speech act theory the theory of language use, sometimes called pragmatics, as opposed to the theory of meaning, or semantics. Based on the meaning–use distinction, it categorizes systematically the sorts of things that can be done with words and explicates the ways these are determined, underdetermined, or undetermined by the meanings of the words used. Relying further on the distinction between speaker meaning and linguistic meaning, it aims to characterize the nature of communicative intentions and how they are expressed and recognized.
Speech acts are a species of intentional action. In general, one and the same utterance may comprise a number of distinct though related acts, each corresponding to a different intention on the part of the speaker. Beyond intending to produce a certain sequence of sounds forming a sentence in English, a person who utters the sentence ‘The door is open’, e.g., is likely to be intending to perform, in the terminology of J. L. Austin (How to Do Things with Words, 1962), (1) the locutionary act of saying (expressing the proposition) that a certain door is open, (2) the illocutionary act of making the statement (expressing the belief) that it is open, and (3) the perlocutionary act of getting his listener to believe that it is open. In so doing, he may be performing the indirect speech act of requesting (illocutionary) the listener to close the door and of getting (perlocutionary) the hearer to close the door. The primary focus of speech act theory is on illocutionary acts, which may be classified in a variety of ways. Statements, predictions, and answers exemplify constatives; requests, commands and permissions are directives; promises, offers, and bets are commissives; greetings, apologies, and congratulations are acknowledgments. These are all communicative illocutionary acts, each distinguished by the type of psychological state expressed by the speaker. Successful communication consists in the audience’s recognition of the speaker’s intention to be expressing a certain psychological state with a certain content. Conventional illocutionary acts, on the other hand, effect or officially affect institutional states of affairs. Examples of the former are appointing, resigning, sentencing, and adjourning; examples of the latter are assessing, acquitting, certifying, and grading. (See Kent Bach and Robert M. Harnish, Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts, 1979.) The type of act an utterance exemplifies determines its illocutionary force. In the example ‘The door is open’, the utterance has the force of both a statement and a request. The illocutionary force potential of a sentence is the force or forces with which it can be used literally, e.g., in the case of the sentence ‘The door is open’, as a statement but not as a request. The felicity conditions on an illocutionary act pertain not only to its communicative or institutional success but also to its sincerity, appropriateness, and effectiveness. An explicit performative utterance is an illocutionary act performed by uttering an indicative sentence in the simple present tense with a verb naming the type of act being performed, e.g., ‘I apologize for everything I did’ and ‘You are requested not to smoke’. The adverb ‘hereby’ may be used before the performative verb (‘apologize’ and ‘request’ in these examples) to indicate that the very utterance being made is the vehicle of the performance of the illocutionary act in question. A good test for distinguishing illocutionary from perlocutionary acts is to determine whether a verb naming the act can be used performatively. Austin exploited the phenomenon of performative utterances to expose the common philosophical error of assuming that the primary use of language is to make statements. See also AUSTIN, J. L.; PHILOSOPHY OF LAN- GUAG. K.B.