speech acts meaning in linguistics

• Tools and Resources
• Customer Services
• Applied Linguistics
• Biology of Language
• Cognitive Science
• Computational Linguistics
• Historical Linguistics
• History of Linguistics
• Language Families/Areas/Contact
• Linguistic Theories
• Neurolinguistics
• Phonetics/Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Sign Languages
• Sociolinguistics
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Article contents

Speech acts.

• Mitchell Green Mitchell Green Philosophy, University of Connecticut
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.200
• Published online: 29 March 2017

Speech acts are acts that can, but need not, be carried out by saying and meaning that one is doing so. Many view speech acts as the central units of communication, with phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of an utterance serving as ways of identifying whether the speaker is making a promise, a prediction, a statement, or a threat. Some speech acts are momentous, since an appropriate authority can, for instance, declare war or sentence a defendant to prison, by saying that he or she is doing so. Speech acts are typically analyzed into two distinct components: a content dimension (corresponding to what is being said), and a force dimension (corresponding to how what is being said is being expressed). The grammatical mood of the sentence used in a speech act signals, but does not uniquely determine, the force of the speech act being performed. A special type of speech act is the performative, which makes explicit the force of the utterance. Although it has been famously claimed that performatives such as “I promise to be there on time” are neither true nor false, current scholarly consensus rejects this view. The study of so-called infelicities concerns the ways in which speech acts might either be defective (say by being insincere) or fail completely.

Recent theorizing about speech acts tends to fall either into conventionalist or intentionalist traditions: the former sees speech acts as analogous to moves in a game, with such acts being governed by rules of the form “doing A counts as doing B”; the latter eschews game-like rules and instead sees speech acts as governed by communicative intentions only. Debate also arises over the extent to which speakers can perform one speech act indirectly by performing another. Skeptics about the frequency of such events contend that many alleged indirect speech acts should be seen instead as expressions of attitudes. New developments in speech act theory also situate them in larger conversational frameworks, such as inquiries, debates, or deliberations made in the course of planning. In addition, recent scholarship has identified a type of oppression against under-represented groups as occurring through “silencing”: a speaker attempts to use a speech act to protect her autonomy, but the putative act fails due to her unjust milieu.

• performative
• illocutionary force
• communicative intentions
• perlocution
• felicity condition
• speaker meaning
• presupposition
• indirect speech act
• illocutionary silencing

You do not currently have access to this article

Please login to access the full content.

Access to the full content requires a subscription

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Linguistics. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 25 April 2024

• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Notice
• [66.249.64.20|195.158.225.230]
• 195.158.225.230

Character limit 500 /500

• Professional Development UPCOMING PROGRAMS Summer Institutes for Teachers Upcoming Conferences Presentations & Workshops PROFESSIONAL OPPORTUNITIES Advanced Practices Certificate CARLA Fellow Program RESOURCES & ARCHIVES Conference Organizing & Publishing Resources Presentation Recordings Conference Archives
• Publications CARLA Publications & Working Papers CARLA Bibliography Literacies in Language Education
• About CARLA CENTER INFORMATION Mission A Language Resource Center Funding History CARLA Update CONTACT INFORMATION Contact Us Mailing List Subscription CARLA Staff & Faculty OTHER INFORMATION Employment Opportunities Request Copyright Permission Document Use of CARLA Material
• Background Information
• American English
• Teaching Tips
• Teaching Materials
• Research Notes
• Australian English
• Functions and Classification
• British English
• Argentinean Spanish
• Canadian French
• Strategy Descriptions
• Marathi & Hindi
• Research Project
• Japanese Speech Acts
• Pragmatics & Speech Acts Bibliography
• Spanish Pragmatics
• CARLA Summer Institutes
• CARLA Bibliography

What is a Speech Act?

A speech act is an utterance that serves a function in communication. We perform speech acts when we offer an apology, greeting, request, complaint, invitation, compliment, or refusal. A speech act might contain just one word, as in "Sorry!" to perform an apology, or several words or sentences: "I’m sorry I forgot your birthday. I just let it slip my mind." Speech acts include real-life interactions and require not only knowledge of the language but also appropriate use of that language within a given culture.

Here are some examples of speech acts we use or hear every day:

Greeting:   "Hi, Eric. How are things going?" Request:   "Could you pass me the mashed potatoes, please?" Complaint:   "I’ve already been waiting three weeks for the computer, and I was told it would be delivered within a week." Invitation:   "We’re having some people over Saturday evening and wanted to know if you’d like to join us." Compliment:   "Hey, I really like your tie!" Refusal:   "Oh, I’d love to see that movie with you but this Friday just isn’t going to work."

Speech acts are difficult to perform in a second language because learners may not know the idiomatic expressions or cultural norms in the second language or they may transfer their first language rules and conventions into the second language, assuming that such rules are universal. Because the natural tendency for language learners is to fall back on what they know to be appropriate in their first language, it is important that these learners understand exactly what they do in that first language in order to be able to recognize what is transferable to other languages. Something that works in English might not transfer in meaning when translated into the second language. For example, the following remark as uttered by a native English speaker could easily be misinterpreted by a native Chinese hearer:

Sarah: "I couldn’t agree with you more. " Cheng: "Hmmm…." (Thinking: "She couldn’t agree with me? I thought she liked my idea!")

An example of potential misunderstanding for an American learner of Japanese would be what is said by a dinner guest in Japan to thank the host. For the invitation and the meal the guests may well apologize a number of times in addition to using an expression of gratitude (arigatou gosaimasu) -- for instance, for the intrusion into the private home (sumimasen ojama shimasu), the commotion that they are causing by getting up from the table (shitsurei shimasu), and also for the fact that they put their host out since they had to cook the meal, serve it, and will have to do the dishes once the guests have left (sumimasen). American guests might think this to be rude or inappropriate and choose to compliment the host on the wonderful food and festive atmosphere, or thank the host for inviting them, unaware of the social conventions involved in performing such a speech act in Japanese. Although such compliments or expression of thanks are also appropriate in Japanese, they are hardly enough for native speakers of Japanese -- not without a few apologies!

Back to Speech Acts .

• Twin Cities Campus:
• Parking & Transportation
• Maps & Directions
•       Directories
• Contact U of M
•       Privacy

• Search Menu
• Browse content in Arts and Humanities
• Browse content in Archaeology
• Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Archaeology
• Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
• Archaeology by Region
• Archaeology of Religion
• Archaeology of Trade and Exchange
• Biblical Archaeology
• Contemporary and Public Archaeology
• Environmental Archaeology
• Historical Archaeology
• History and Theory of Archaeology
• Industrial Archaeology
• Landscape Archaeology
• Mortuary Archaeology
• Prehistoric Archaeology
• Underwater Archaeology
• Urban Archaeology
• Zooarchaeology
• Browse content in Architecture
• Architectural Structure and Design
• History of Architecture
• Residential and Domestic Buildings
• Theory of Architecture
• Browse content in Art
• Art Subjects and Themes
• History of Art
• Industrial and Commercial Art
• Theory of Art
• Biographical Studies
• Byzantine Studies
• Browse content in Classical Studies
• Classical Literature
• Classical Reception
• Classical History
• Classical Philosophy
• Classical Mythology
• Classical Art and Architecture
• Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
• Greek and Roman Papyrology
• Greek and Roman Archaeology
• Greek and Roman Epigraphy
• Greek and Roman Law
• Late Antiquity
• Religion in the Ancient World
• Digital Humanities
• Browse content in History
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Diplomatic History
• Environmental History
• Genealogy, Heraldry, Names, and Honours
• Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
• Historical Geography
• History by Period
• History of Emotions
• History of Agriculture
• History of Education
• History of Gender and Sexuality
• Industrial History
• Intellectual History
• International History
• Labour History
• Legal and Constitutional History
• Local and Family History
• Maritime History
• Military History
• National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
• Oral History
• Political History
• Public History
• Regional and National History
• Revolutions and Rebellions
• Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
• Social and Cultural History
• Theory, Methods, and Historiography
• Urban History
• World History
• Browse content in Language Teaching and Learning
• Language Learning (Specific Skills)
• Language Teaching Theory and Methods
• Browse content in Linguistics
• Applied Linguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Forensic Linguistics
• Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
• Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
• History of English
• Language Evolution
• Language Reference
• Language Variation
• Language Families
• Language Acquisition
• Lexicography
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Linguistic Theories
• Linguistic Typology
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Translation and Interpretation
• Writing Systems
• Browse content in Literature
• Bibliography
• Children's Literature Studies
• Literary Studies (Romanticism)
• Literary Studies (American)
• Literary Studies (Modernism)
• Literary Studies (Asian)
• Literary Studies (European)
• Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
• Literary Studies - World
• Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
• Literary Studies (19th Century)
• Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
• Literary Studies (African American Literature)
• Literary Studies (British and Irish)
• Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
• Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
• Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
• Literary Studies (Graphic Novels)
• Literary Studies (History of the Book)
• Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
• Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
• Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
• Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
• Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
• Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
• Literary Studies (War Literature)
• Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Mythology and Folklore
• Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
• Browse content in Media Studies
• Browse content in Music
• Applied Music
• Dance and Music
• Ethics in Music
• Ethnomusicology
• Gender and Sexuality in Music
• Medicine and Music
• Music Cultures
• Music and Media
• Music and Culture
• Music and Religion
• Music Education and Pedagogy
• Music Theory and Analysis
• Musical Scores, Lyrics, and Libretti
• Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
• Musicology and Music History
• Performance Practice and Studies
• Race and Ethnicity in Music
• Sound Studies
• Browse content in Performing Arts
• Browse content in Philosophy
• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Epistemology
• Feminist Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Moral Philosophy
• Non-Western Philosophy
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Perception
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Law
• Philosophy of Religion
• Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
• Practical Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Browse content in Religion
• Biblical Studies
• Christianity
• East Asian Religions
• History of Religion
• Judaism and Jewish Studies
• Qumran Studies
• Religion and Education
• Religion and Health
• Religion and Politics
• Religion and Science
• Religion and Law
• Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
• Religious Studies
• Browse content in Society and Culture
• Cookery, Food, and Drink
• Cultural Studies
• Customs and Traditions
• Ethical Issues and Debates
• Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
• Lifestyle, Home, and Garden
• Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
• Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
• Sports and Outdoor Recreation
• Technology and Society
• Travel and Holiday
• Visual Culture
• Browse content in Law
• Arbitration
• Browse content in Company and Commercial Law
• Commercial Law
• Company Law
• Browse content in Comparative Law
• Systems of Law
• Competition Law
• Browse content in Constitutional and Administrative Law
• Government Powers
• Judicial Review
• Local Government Law
• Military and Defence Law
• Parliamentary and Legislative Practice
• Construction Law
• Contract Law
• Browse content in Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure
• Criminal Evidence Law
• Sentencing and Punishment
• Employment and Labour Law
• Environment and Energy Law
• Browse content in Financial Law
• Banking Law
• Insolvency Law
• History of Law
• Human Rights and Immigration
• Intellectual Property Law
• Browse content in International Law
• Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
• Public International Law
• IT and Communications Law
• Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
• Law and Society
• Law and Politics
• Browse content in Legal System and Practice
• Courts and Procedure
• Legal Skills and Practice
• Primary Sources of Law
• Regulation of Legal Profession
• Medical and Healthcare Law
• Browse content in Policing
• Criminal Investigation and Detection
• Police and Security Services
• Police Procedure and Law
• Police Regional Planning
• Browse content in Property Law
• Personal Property Law
• Study and Revision
• Terrorism and National Security Law
• Browse content in Trusts Law
• Wills and Probate or Succession
• Browse content in Medicine and Health
• Browse content in Allied Health Professions
• Arts Therapies
• Clinical Science
• Dietetics and Nutrition
• Occupational Therapy
• Operating Department Practice
• Physiotherapy
• Radiography
• Speech and Language Therapy
• Browse content in Anaesthetics
• General Anaesthesia
• Neuroanaesthesia
• Clinical Neuroscience
• Browse content in Clinical Medicine
• Acute Medicine
• Cardiovascular Medicine
• Clinical Genetics
• Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
• Dermatology
• Endocrinology and Diabetes
• Gastroenterology
• Genito-urinary Medicine
• Geriatric Medicine
• Infectious Diseases
• Medical Toxicology
• Medical Oncology
• Pain Medicine
• Palliative Medicine
• Rehabilitation Medicine
• Respiratory Medicine and Pulmonology
• Rheumatology
• Sleep Medicine
• Sports and Exercise Medicine
• Community Medical Services
• Critical Care
• Emergency Medicine
• Forensic Medicine
• Haematology
• History of Medicine
• Browse content in Medical Skills
• Clinical Skills
• Communication Skills
• Nursing Skills
• Surgical Skills
• Medical Ethics
• Browse content in Medical Dentistry
• Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
• Paediatric Dentistry
• Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics
• Surgical Dentistry
• Medical Statistics and Methodology
• Browse content in Neurology
• Clinical Neurophysiology
• Neuropathology
• Nursing Studies
• Browse content in Obstetrics and Gynaecology
• Gynaecology
• Occupational Medicine
• Ophthalmology
• Otolaryngology (ENT)
• Browse content in Paediatrics
• Neonatology
• Browse content in Pathology
• Chemical Pathology
• Clinical Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics
• Histopathology
• Medical Microbiology and Virology
• Patient Education and Information
• Browse content in Pharmacology
• Psychopharmacology
• Browse content in Popular Health
• Caring for Others
• Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Self-help and Personal Development
• Browse content in Preclinical Medicine
• Cell Biology
• Molecular Biology and Genetics
• Reproduction, Growth and Development
• Primary Care
• Professional Development in Medicine
• Browse content in Psychiatry
• Addiction Medicine
• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Forensic Psychiatry
• Learning Disabilities
• Old Age Psychiatry
• Psychotherapy
• Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
• Epidemiology
• Public Health
• Browse content in Radiology
• Clinical Radiology
• Interventional Radiology
• Nuclear Medicine
• Radiation Oncology
• Reproductive Medicine
• Browse content in Surgery
• Cardiothoracic Surgery
• Gastro-intestinal and Colorectal Surgery
• General Surgery
• Neurosurgery
• Paediatric Surgery
• Peri-operative Care
• Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
• Surgical Oncology
• Transplant Surgery
• Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery
• Vascular Surgery
• Browse content in Science and Mathematics
• Browse content in Biological Sciences
• Aquatic Biology
• Biochemistry
• Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
• Developmental Biology
• Ecology and Conservation
• Evolutionary Biology
• Genetics and Genomics
• Microbiology
• Molecular and Cell Biology
• Natural History
• Plant Sciences and Forestry
• Research Methods in Life Sciences
• Structural Biology
• Systems Biology
• Zoology and Animal Sciences
• Browse content in Chemistry
• Analytical Chemistry
• Computational Chemistry
• Crystallography
• Environmental Chemistry
• Industrial Chemistry
• Inorganic Chemistry
• Materials Chemistry
• Medicinal Chemistry
• Mineralogy and Gems
• Organic Chemistry
• Physical Chemistry
• Polymer Chemistry
• Study and Communication Skills in Chemistry
• Theoretical Chemistry
• Browse content in Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Architecture and Logic Design
• Game Studies
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Mathematical Theory of Computation
• Programming Languages
• Software Engineering
• Systems Analysis and Design
• Virtual Reality
• Browse content in Computing
• Business Applications
• Computer Games
• Computer Security
• Computer Networking and Communications
• Digital Lifestyle
• Graphical and Digital Media Applications
• Operating Systems
• Browse content in Earth Sciences and Geography
• Atmospheric Sciences
• Environmental Geography
• Geology and the Lithosphere
• Maps and Map-making
• Meteorology and Climatology
• Oceanography and Hydrology
• Palaeontology
• Physical Geography and Topography
• Regional Geography
• Soil Science
• Urban Geography
• Browse content in Engineering and Technology
• Agriculture and Farming
• Biological Engineering
• Civil Engineering, Surveying, and Building
• Electronics and Communications Engineering
• Energy Technology
• Engineering (General)
• Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology
• History of Engineering and Technology
• Mechanical Engineering and Materials
• Technology of Industrial Chemistry
• Transport Technology and Trades
• Browse content in Environmental Science
• Applied Ecology (Environmental Science)
• Conservation of the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Environmental Sustainability
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Environmental Science)
• Management of Land and Natural Resources (Environmental Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environmental Science)
• Nuclear Issues (Environmental Science)
• Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Environmental Science)
• History of Science and Technology
• Browse content in Materials Science
• Ceramics and Glasses
• Composite Materials
• Metals, Alloying, and Corrosion
• Nanotechnology
• Browse content in Mathematics
• Applied Mathematics
• Biomathematics and Statistics
• History of Mathematics
• Mathematical Education
• Mathematical Finance
• Mathematical Analysis
• Numerical and Computational Mathematics
• Probability and Statistics
• Pure Mathematics
• Browse content in Neuroscience
• Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
• Development of the Nervous System
• Disorders of the Nervous System
• History of Neuroscience
• Invertebrate Neurobiology
• Molecular and Cellular Systems
• Neuroendocrinology and Autonomic Nervous System
• Neuroscientific Techniques
• Sensory and Motor Systems
• Browse content in Physics
• Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
• Biological and Medical Physics
• Classical Mechanics
• Computational Physics
• Condensed Matter Physics
• Electromagnetism, Optics, and Acoustics
• History of Physics
• Mathematical and Statistical Physics
• Measurement Science
• Nuclear Physics
• Particles and Fields
• Plasma Physics
• Quantum Physics
• Relativity and Gravitation
• Semiconductor and Mesoscopic Physics
• Browse content in Psychology
• Affective Sciences
• Clinical Psychology
• Cognitive Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Criminal and Forensic Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Health Psychology
• History and Systems in Psychology
• Music Psychology
• Neuropsychology
• Organizational Psychology
• Psychological Assessment and Testing
• Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction
• Psychology Professional Development and Training
• Research Methods in Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Browse content in Social Sciences
• Browse content in Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Human Evolution
• Medical Anthropology
• Physical Anthropology
• Regional Anthropology
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Theory and Practice of Anthropology
• Browse content in Business and Management
• Business Ethics
• Business History
• Business Strategy
• Business and Technology
• Business and Government
• Business and the Environment
• Comparative Management
• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Entrepreneurship
• Health Management
• Human Resource Management
• Industrial and Employment Relations
• Industry Studies
• Information and Communication Technologies
• International Business
• Knowledge Management
• Management and Management Techniques
• Operations Management
• Organizational Theory and Behaviour
• Pensions and Pension Management
• Public and Nonprofit Management
• Strategic Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Browse content in Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice
• Criminology
• Forms of Crime
• International and Comparative Criminology
• Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
• Development Studies
• Browse content in Economics
• Agricultural, Environmental, and Natural Resource Economics
• Asian Economics
• Behavioural Finance
• Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
• Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
• Economic History
• Economic Methodology
• Economic Systems
• Economic Development and Growth
• Financial Markets
• Financial Institutions and Services
• General Economics and Teaching
• Health, Education, and Welfare
• History of Economic Thought
• International Economics
• Labour and Demographic Economics
• Law and Economics
• Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
• Microeconomics
• Public Economics
• Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
• Welfare Economics
• Browse content in Education
• Adult Education and Continuous Learning
• Care and Counselling of Students
• Early Childhood and Elementary Education
• Educational Equipment and Technology
• Educational Strategies and Policy
• Higher and Further Education
• Organization and Management of Education
• Philosophy and Theory of Education
• Schools Studies
• Secondary Education
• Teaching of a Specific Subject
• Teaching of Specific Groups and Special Educational Needs
• Teaching Skills and Techniques
• Browse content in Environment
• Applied Ecology (Social Science)
• Climate Change
• Conservation of the Environment (Social Science)
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Social Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environment)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
• Browse content in Human Geography
• Cultural Geography
• Economic Geography
• Political Geography
• Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
• Communication Studies
• Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
• Browse content in Politics
• African Politics
• Asian Politics
• Chinese Politics
• Comparative Politics
• Conflict Politics
• Elections and Electoral Studies
• Environmental Politics
• European Union
• Foreign Policy
• Gender and Politics
• Human Rights and Politics
• Indian Politics
• International Relations
• International Organization (Politics)
• International Political Economy
• Irish Politics
• Latin American Politics
• Middle Eastern Politics
• Political Behaviour
• Political Economy
• Political Institutions
• Political Theory
• Political Methodology
• Political Communication
• Political Philosophy
• Political Sociology
• Politics and Law
• Public Policy
• Public Administration
• Quantitative Political Methodology
• Regional Political Studies
• Russian Politics
• Security Studies
• State and Local Government
• UK Politics
• US Politics
• Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
• African Studies
• Asian Studies
• East Asian Studies
• Japanese Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Middle Eastern Studies
• Native American Studies
• Scottish Studies
• Browse content in Research and Information
• Research Methods
• Browse content in Social Work
• Addictions and Substance Misuse
• Adoption and Fostering
• Care of the Elderly
• Child and Adolescent Social Work
• Couple and Family Social Work
• Developmental and Physical Disabilities Social Work
• Direct Practice and Clinical Social Work
• Emergency Services
• Human Behaviour and the Social Environment
• International and Global Issues in Social Work
• Mental and Behavioural Health
• Social Justice and Human Rights
• Social Policy and Advocacy
• Social Work and Crime and Justice
• Social Work Macro Practice
• Social Work Practice Settings
• Social Work Research and Evidence-based Practice
• Welfare and Benefit Systems
• Browse content in Sociology
• Childhood Studies
• Community Development
• Comparative and Historical Sociology
• Economic Sociology
• Gender and Sexuality
• Gerontology and Ageing
• Health, Illness, and Medicine
• Marriage and the Family
• Migration Studies
• Occupations, Professions, and Work
• Organizations
• Population and Demography
• Race and Ethnicity
• Social Theory
• Social Movements and Social Change
• Social Research and Statistics
• Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
• Sociology of Religion
• Sociology of Education
• Sport and Leisure
• Urban and Rural Studies
• Browse content in Warfare and Defence
• Defence Strategy, Planning, and Research
• Land Forces and Warfare
• Military Administration
• Military Life and Institutions
• Naval Forces and Warfare
• Other Warfare and Defence Issues
• Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
• Weapons and Equipment

• < Previous chapter
• Next chapter >

10 Speech Acts

Stephen C. Levinson is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and Professor of Comparative Linguistics at Radboud University, Nijmegen. He is the author of over 270 publications on language and cognition, including the books Politeness (Cambridge University Press, 1987, with Penelope Brown), Pragmatics (Cambridge University Press, 1983), Presumptive Meanings(MIT Press, 2000), Space in language and cognition (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and has edited the collections (with D. Wilkins) Grammars of space (Cambridge University Press), (with M. Bowerman) Language acquisition and conceptual development (Cambridge University Press), (with P. Jaisson) Culture and evolution (MIT Press), (with N. Enfield) Roots of sociality (Berg), (with P. Lee), new edition of Language, thought, and reality: selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (MIT Press). His current research is focused on the cognitive foundations for communication, and the relation of language to general cognition. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Academia Europaea and has received a 5–year ERC Advanced Grant in 2011.

• Published: 07 March 2016
• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

The essential insight of speech act theory was that when we use language, we perform actions—in a more modern parlance, core language use in interaction is a form of joint action. Over the last thirty years, speech acts have been relatively neglected in linguistic pragmatics, although important work has been done especially in conversation analysis. Here we review the core issues—the identifying characteristics, the degree of universality, the problem of multiple functions, and the puzzle of speech act recognition. Special attention is drawn to the role of conversation structure, probabilistic linguistic cues, and plan or sequence inference in speech act recognition, and to the centrality of deep recursive structures in sequences of speech acts in conversation.

10.1 Introduction

The concept of speech act is one of the most important notions in pragmatics. The term denotes the sense in which utterances are not mere meaning-bearers, but rather in a very real sense do things, that is, perform actions. This is clear from a number of simple observations:

utterances in conversation (and that is the only kind considered in this article) respond not to the shape or meaning of what was said, but to the underlying ‘point’ or action performed by the prior turn at talk, which might have been expressed in any number of ways;

utterances often have non-verbal counterparts (cf. waving to saying hello; bidding at auction by hand or voice);

utterances interdigitate with non-verbal actions in action sequences (cf. ordering a sandwich in a service encounter);

utterances have real-world consequences just like non-verbal actions (a $1,000 bid at an auction commits you to paying; saying you have nothing to declare in an airport can get you a big fine).

These actions are on a different ontological plane than the actions of the vocal organs in speech, which of course activate the motor cortex just as much as reaching for a glass—speech acts are more like moves in chess, whose meanings are circumscribed by rules and expectations. Trying to understand how utterances can have these abstract action-like properties, how they are coded linguistically, and how we recognize them are some of the core issues in this domain.

Despite the fact that speech acts are clearly central to an understanding of language use, they have been largely off the linguistics agenda since the 1980s. As is often the case in science, research on speech acts boomed for a little over a decade (in the 1970s and 1980s), and then went out of fashion without the most fundamental issues being resolved at all. Amongst these unanswered questions are: How many types are there, and are they universal or culturally specific? How are they expressed in language? And how are they recognized or attributed in actual language use? These questions are addressed in sections 10.3–10.9 below.

10.2 A Brief History of the Concepts Leading to the Current State of the Art

In philosophy of language during the 1930s and 1940s the picture theory of meaning, and the broader correspondence theory of truth, began to be challenged by theories of language use being developed by the later Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge and the ‘ordinary language’ philosophers like Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin in Oxford. It is Austin who is usually credited with the first developed theory of speech acts, although his influential lectures ‘How to do things with words’ were not published until 1962 after his death ( Austin 1962a ). Austin took the view that philosophy of language had wrongly concentrated on statements, or even just propositions, and in doing so had lost track of what language is mostly used for. Rather, he claimed, utterances attempt to do things, and just like other actions can fail for a range of reasons. He catalogued the kinds of actions performed, by noting that most speech acts (however colloquially expressed) can be paraphrased in the normal form ‘I hereby V performative ’ where a delimited set of verbs like order, promise, warn, congratulate could appear. He also classified the reasons for success or failure of speech acts, dubbed ‘felicity conditions’, noting that they often require appropriate subjective states (later called ‘sincerity conditions’ by Searle) as well as appropriate circumstances (Searle’s ‘preparatory conditions’). In this sort of way all the reasons for my bid at Christie’s for a Picasso not succeeding (I am not a registered bidder, lack the funds, don’t succeed in getting the attention of the auctioneer, etc.) can be spelled out. Speech acts can be understood on the analogy of ceremonies, like marriage or toasting the monarch’s health—in the same sort of way they are conventional arrangements for creating new states of affairs, and consequently are in principle open-ended in kind. Austin went on to notice that these success conditions not only parallel truth conditions, but actually subsume them; statements are therefore just a special class of speech acts with sincerity conditions of belief and presuppositions or preparatory conditions that must also be met. He also went to some pains to clarify all the different senses in which actions could be said to be performed by utterances: the ‘locutionary act’ is the saying of the words with the intended meanings, the ‘illocutionary act (or force)’ is the speech act proper (ordering, advising, warning, etc.), and the ‘perlocutionary act’ is the further act or consequences that are context-specific and not part of the specific conventions invoked (e.g. by asking your advice I might flatter you). Austin also developed a number of notions whose importance was not immediately realized—for example, the concept of ‘uptake’ (the ratified receipt and recognition by a recipient).

Austin’s work was influentially systematized by John Searle (1969) , who connected the theory to sociology and jurisprudence on the one hand (speech acts are built as constitutive rules, whereby doing X counts as constituting a new state of affairs, like scoring a goal, or being guilty of a specific crime), and to linguistics on the other hand. Noting, following Hare (1952) , that the same propositional content could occur across speech acts (as in ‘Pass the exam’, ‘Did you pass the exam?’, ‘Good luck with the exam’), he added a ‘propositional content condition’, so that the felicity conditions together now effectively defined the speech act. He went on to suggest that an exhaustive typology of speech acts could be arrived at by clustering types of felicity conditions, so that there can be seen to be just five main types: representatives (statements and the like), directives (questions, requests, orders), commissives (threats, promises, offers), expressives (thanking, apologizing, congratulating, etc.), and declarations (like christening, declaring war, firing, etc. which rely on elaborate institutional backgrounds). Searle’s theory was well articulated and proved attractive to linguists, as recounted below.

Meanwhile, other philosophers took a more psychological view of language use, chief among them Grice and Strawson, who both thought that speech acts should be thought about as specific classes of intention, e.g. intentions to cause beliefs in addressees, or intentions to get them to do things. Grice ( 1957 , 1975 ) reconstructed the notion of meaning along these lines, and characterized the use of language in conversation as guided by rational action between partners. Although he never laid this out in print, it is clear that he thought that felicity conditions simply follow from the specific classes of intention: if I want to get you to pass the water by saying ‘Could you pass the water?’, it would simply be irrational if I didn’t want the water, if the water is not in your reach, if you are deaf or otherwise preoccupied. This intentional perspective was followed up by work in natural-language processing that related speech act recognition to plan recognition (see section 10.7 ).

During the period of generative semantics, linguists became increasingly interested in language usage and how sentences might encode aspects of the contexts in which they are used. Searle and other theorists had not concentrated on the actualities of speech act coding, presuming instead that illocutionary force is coded in the major sentence types (imperatives, interrogatives, and declaratives) and in the explicit performative verbs when so used—these would be the ‘literal illocutionary forces’ of utterances. But as any practical grammarian of English or other languages knows, in fact one has to learn idiomatic means of expressing speech acts. Gordon and Lakoff (1971) noted for the first time that ‘indirect speech acts’ could also routinely be expressed by querying or stating a felicity condition: ‘Do you need that pencil?’, ‘Could I have that pencil’, ‘Is that your pencil?’, ‘I’d like that pencil’ all query or state a precondition on requesting. They also noted that adverbials like please or frankly might force a particular speech act reading (as in ‘Please could we begin on time?’). There followed a large literature on indirect speech acts, investigating the forms used especially for requests across cultures, the psychological processing (indirect speech acts seemed to be processed without any complex detour through a literal meaning), and the politeness reasons for the mismatch between direct and indirect speech act coding. By the end of the 1980s, however, linguistic interests had moved largely elsewhere.

Meanwhile, a completely different approach, unrelated to the linguistic and philosophical traditions, was being taken in sociology, where the empirical study of conversation was being born in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Unencumbered by theory, the conversation analysts (Harvey Sacks, Manny Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson especially) were observing all sorts of fundamental organizations for interactive language use: turn-taking, repair, and sequence organization (see e.g. Schegloff and Sacks 1973 , Schegloff 2007a , and this volume ). In doing so, they were finding speech acts that had no vernacular names, no associated performative verbs or (it seems) special markings, for example pre-closings (e.g. the exchange of well s before goodbyes in phone calls), assessments (evaluations of shared events or things), repair initiators (like excuse me? ), pre-invitations ( What are you doing on Friday night? ), and so forth. Such actions (as the conversational analysts call them, treated here as equivalent to the notion of speech act) can only be understood against the background of sequential position—that is, where they come with relation to prior or following turns. Despite the fact that many observations have now accrued about the sets of actions and their sequential placement, little systematic theory about actions has emerged from this work (for a survey see Levinson 2013a ; Drew 2013 ).

Although this brief review cannot do justice to the extensive work that has been done in the different disciplines interested in speech acts (linguistics, psychology, conversation analysis) (see Levinson 1983 , 2013a ), it serves as a pointer to the state of the art. There is general acceptance of the importance of the subject, but little recent research that advances our understanding of the fundamental questions.

10.3 The Essential Insight and the Leading Issues

In contrast to the emphasis in modern linguistics on language as a device for an endless sound–meaning correspondence, J. L. Austin’s core insight was that the central function of language is not to deliver meanings but to deliver speech acts. For the core ecological niche for language, and still its primary use and the locus of its acquisition, is conversation. Each of us produces on average perhaps 16 000 words and 1200 turns at talk a day—and each turn delivers a speech act: all in all we are participating in exchanges with something like 5000 speech act moves a day. In order to respond on time (within the c .200 ms allowed by the turn-taking system; Stivers et al. 2009 ) we need to decode or attribute speech acts at lightning speed, because it is the illocutionary force, not the meaning, that we primarily respond to. One of the central puzzles is that speech acts are not for the most part simply or directly coded in the linguistic form: for example, Where are you going? could be an idle question, or a challenge, or a reprimand, or a prelude (a pre-) to a request for a ride or to an offer to give you a ride, and the relevant response depends on the correct attribution. How then are speech acts recognized in the tight time-frame allowed? Is there a finite list of possible action types, or can they be created de novo ? Further, as just illustrated, an utterance or turn can perform more than one action simultaneously: in asking a question ( Where are you going? ) the speaker could also be transparently performing a pre-request in such a way that the addressee can make an offer in next turn ( Downtown, would you like a ride? ). How many acts can be performed at once?

These then are the central puzzles in this area, to be taken up below. Faced with these difficulties, to which current research yields no definitive answers, it is tempting for linguistic theory to simply hand over the can of worms to some other discipline (conversation analysis, for example) as e.g. Bierwisch (1980) recommended. However, as discussed in section 10.8 , there is a substantial intersection of speech acts and linguistic structure, which makes the topic of central importance for e.g. the study of syntax. Usage and structure in fact go hand in hand.

10.4 The Nature of the Beast: Identifying Speech Acts

In this section we consider the problem of identifying and cataloguing speech acts, given some problematic properties, like their implicit character and non-one-to-one mapping onto utterances.

There are four (three basic and one related) approaches to identifying or characterizing speech acts. First, one could rely on natural metalanguage, as in English offer, request, invitation, greeting , and so on. Austin’s own tack here, recollect, was to do the lexicography of performative verbs ( I hereby declare/choose/delegate/promise/undertake/bequeath … ). But there are many reasons to distrust natural metalanguage. Many speech acts have no vernacular names (such actions as pre-invitations, continuers, repair initiators, and the like), as discovered by the conversational analysts. In addition, while written languages often have large metalanguage resources of this kind, unwritten ones often do not, and they may have speech acts alien to us. So natural language terms are a poor guide.

A second approach is the use of felicity conditions to characterize speech acts, as in classical speech act theory. A problem here is that taken as necessary conditions jointly sufficient to define speech acts, it is hard to specify them right. Thus the conditions for genuine information-seeking questions, exam questions, questions checking facts, and questions used in repair will all be subtly different—they form a loose family of speech act types not easily captured by a definitive checklist of conditions.

A third approach favoured by conversation analysts is to use the character of responses to identify prior actions. For example, if a range of utterances X–Y–Z are all immediately responded to by fellow interactants passing the speaker something, then prima facie X–Y–Z are requests. The observation is that many speech acts come in pairs (‘adjacency pairs’), with an initiating action having a characteristic response, as in greetings followed by greetings, offers by acceptances (or declinings), questions by answers, and so forth ( Schegloff 2007a ; Stivers 2013 ). Thus if one can independently characterize the responding action, one can type the eliciting action. Conversation analysts argue that this is how we check that we are understood—we expect a response of a certain type. Consider, the following example, where the response marked by thanks and excuses suggests that for B , A’s turn appears to have been an offer, though that is not obvious from its structure or content:

A fourth, related approach is to appreciate that an utterance gets parts of its identity from the sequential position it occupies. Consider the following tokens of the utterance Okay , each doing entirely different things (labelled here with the action codings used in conversation analysis—see Schegloff 2007a ):

One aspect of speech acts thus highlighted is that they are necessarily interactional in character. Consider a proposal (say about going for a walk together)—for success, the action depends on the uptake: it takes two to tango. This is a fundamental aspect of speech acts neglected in Searlian analysis—almost all speech acts are joint actions ( Clark 1996 ). 1

Most analysis actually makes use of all four of these different kinds of identifying properties, trading on our vernacular terminology, trying to tighten it up by defining criteria, considering how participants themselves respond to utterances, and noting how utterances play different roles depending on their positioning vis-à-vis other speech acts.

10.5 The Inventory and its Universality

A natural question is how many kinds of speech acts are there? The question presumes a level of abstraction away from the specific propositional content, which may of course be unique: it’s a question about how many types of illocutionary force exist. Austin suggested an open-ended list, convention-based, so cultural in nature. In contrast Grice (in unpublished work: Grice 1973 ; see also Schiffer 1972 ) had suggested that complex speech act types could be built up from the two propositional attitudes of wanting and judging. His target was the ‘moods’ expressed in the major sentence types, namely declaratives, imperatives, and interrogatives. Most languages grammatically code at least two of these, which could be taken as a hint of a cross-cultural core of basic speech acts. However it is moot whether these forms really code speech acts since they are in practice used for diverse action types, while other minor sentence types like English expressives more directly code for force (see section 10.6 ). But the idea that speech acts fall into classes of intention is persistent (see e.g. Tomasello 2008 ).

Searle, taking an intermediate position, has argued that there are in fact just five large classes of things one can do with language—five major speech act types. The classification uses three parameters: the ‘essential conditions’ (Searle’s term for the intentional goal), the sincerity conditions, and ‘direction of fit’ (whether the words copy the world as in statements or the world copies the words as in promises). Searle’s classes are representatives (assertion-like), directives (questioning, requesting, etc.), commissives (promising, threatening, offering), expressives (thanking, apologizing, etc.), and declarations (blessing, christening, etc., which rely on special institutional backgrounds).

Searle’s classification cannot however be exhaustive. First it fails to accommodate many of the actions noted by the conversation analysts (e.g. the continuer hmhm , the pre-s, the repair initiators and the repair responses, and so forth). Second, it is culture-bound. Consider the following exchange simplified and in translation from the language Yélî Dnye ( Levinson 2005 ):

This is an adjacency pair of a special kind peculiar to this matrilineal Papuan culture, in which men make jokes by alluding to some unfortunate accident or event that befell the other man’s father-in-law, to which the response must be immediate and in kind (B’s father-in-law killed his wife and then himself with a bush-knife, while A’s father-in-law died falling from a mangrove tree; they are ostensibly commenting on a man yelling down a megaphone). These utterances are paired father-in-law jokes and they don’t describe states of affairs or express the feelings of the speakers or otherwise fall within Searle’s taxonomy. In addition, Searle’s classification is of course a higher-order grouping of types, so it will not help us understand the specifics of action and response in conversation.

Austin or Searle’s armchair classifications are based on intuitions about salient types of speech acts. These are nearly always first parts of (base) adjacency pairs (see Schegloff 2007a , this volume )—that is, the initiating actions (like questions, offers, invitations) to which responses are due (even then, many such initiatory actions have proved relatively unavailable to intuition, like repair initiators, continuers, assessments, and the like). But the actions that lead in to these initiators (e.g. pre-announcements, pre-closings) or the responses themselves (e.g. answers, agreements, continuers, counter-offers), or the actions that interpose between first part and second (e.g. clarification questions) escape proper treatment in classical speech act theory. Consider (with arrowed action labelling):

Describing line (1) as a question would miss its basic function, namely to check whether a news announcement should be made; line (2) makes clear it should (note the what ); line (3) sets up the topic of the announcement in such a way than no announcement proves necessary, for the recipient guesses in line (4). Thus although (1) and (2) could be said to be questions that is not their main function, which is as preliminaries to an announcement (see Levinson 1983 : 345–364; and Schegloff 2007a for more on pre-s). Recollect as mentioned above that conversation analysts have emphasized that it is the character of the response, or the locus in a sequence, that plays a major role in giving speech acts their identities.

To return to the central questions of this section: Is there a finite set of speech act types, and if so how big is it? The answers are that we really don’t know. Is the set universal in character? Not in the sense that all speech acts are pan-cultural (witness Yélî Dnye father-in-law jokes, or any of the institutionally circumscribed acts like finding guilty, proposing toasts, declaring war, etc.), but it is an open question as to whether there is a pan-cultural core with such plausibly general functions as telling, questioning, requesting, greeting, agreeing, or initiating repair.

10.6 The Multiple Action Problem

One particularly troubling feature of the mapping of speech acts onto utterances is that such a mapping is not necessarily, or even mostly, 1:1. Sometimes turns at talk have more than one constructional component, and each part can perform an action, as in the previous example (4) above and in (5):

But often a single constructional unit (whether or not it exhausts the turn) can do more than one action (as in (4) where Didju hear the terrible news? might be said to be a question, but carries with it the obligation to tell the news, conditional on the answer ‘no’). Consider the following example from a verbal tussle between a mother and her 14-year-old daughter Virginia wanting more allowance or pocket money:

Viriginia’s proposal is responded to by a question-like response, which has the form of an other-initiator of repair or OIR (i.e. is initiated by the responder, seeking repair on the prior turn). But it is a prosodically incredulous OIR, adumbrating an upcoming challenge (call it a pre-challenge), which after a go-ahead, is duly delivered ( Just to throw away? ) but again in the form of a question inviting repair. That extreme formulation of the question in turn prefigures a rejection (call the turn then a pre-rejection), and gets a defence. And so forth. But now notice we have multiple layers of function for each turn—up to four actions packed into the one subclausal turn in Just to throw away !

The question that arises is whether there is any limit to the number of actions that a single turn can bear. Notice that some of these might merely be a matter of granularity of description, e.g. a special kind of question is often used to ask for repair. But that is not the kind of relation between the question and, say, the challenge: notice how the response deals with both. The literature acknowledges the existence of turns performing two actions: on one account, a ‘literal speech act’ is used to deliver an ‘indirect speech act’ ( Searle 1975 ), and conversation analysts talk about one action being the vehicle for one other action ( Schegloff 2007a ). But there is no explanation for turns that perform three or more actions (see, however, the suggestions in terms of plan reconstruction at the end of the next section).

10.7 Bottom-Up and Top-Down Inference in Speech Act Recognition and Attribution

Speech acts, it has been suggested, are not easy to individuate or identify, are not known to come from a finite or universal set, and can be laminated one on top of another. These are problematic properties. But an even greater problem is how they are recognized (more properly attributed 2 ) under the extraordinary time pressures of spoken conversation (or any other interactional use of language). Here we concentrate on the comprehension problem. As already mentioned, on average across languages the gaps between turns are on the order of 200–300 ms ( Stivers et al. 2009 ; Levinson and Torreira 2015 ). Given that the fastest response from conception to word takes 600 + ms ( Levelt 1989 ; responses of any complexity, e.g. three or more words, take 900–1500 ms or more to prepare), it is clear that speakers in conversation predict the end of the incoming turn in order to launch their own response on time. But that response must ‘type’ the incoming turn, as e.g. a question, request, statement, before it has finished in order to compose the relevant response and launch it so it comes out on time. Probably this is done on average about halfway through the incoming turn (see Magyari et al. 2014 ).

This makes the speed at which speech acts are attributed appear quite miraculous. For, as already made clear, the coding of speech acts is for the most part not directly marked: most syntactic forms, even whole constructions like Why don’t you … , are multi-duty ( why don’t you turns out to code proposals, advice, invitations, and complaints, while Do you want codes requests, invitations, offers, and so forth; Couper-Kuhlen 2010 ).

Speech act recognition is similar to any perception problem, where pattern has to be discerned and categorized out of noise. Both ‘bottom-up’ information (in the signal) and ‘top-down’ information (expected categories) are usually involved, and the noisier the channel the greater the role for ‘top-down’ factors. Let us consider them in turn. Bottom-up information is whatever clues to speech act type can be found directly coded or cued in the signal, by lexical choice, construction, or prosody. Given the turn-taking facts, it is clear that signals early on in a turn are going to be more important than signals at the end of turns, since by then the choice of response must have already been made. This suggests that effective cues will be ‘front-loaded’, coming early in the turn (see Levinson 2013a ). Here the cross-linguistic facts are curious. Take the grammar of interrogatives, associated (though not exclusively) with the illocutionary force of questioning. First, wh - or content interrogatives are only grammatically initial in about one third of languages ( Dryer 2011b ); however, this is the dominant single strategy since the alternative positions are various, and Dryer notes that only ‘a few languages exhibit at least a weak tendency to place interrogative phrases at the end of sentences’ (he mentions two out of a sample of 900 languages). These facts are in line with the ‘front-loading’ prediction from the psycholinguistic facts, but only as a tendency. The prediction would be that languages with late (right-located) wh - words would have developed compensatory cues like prosody or particles positioned earlier in the clause.

Second, take polar (yes/no) questions ( Dryer 2011a ). The commonest coding strategy (60 per cent of languages) is by particle, and of these about 30 per cent are in initial or second position; however the commonest position of particles is final (50 per cent of all particle types). It is worth noting, however, that 30 per cent of languages have no lexical or morphosyntactic coding at all for polar questions, relying solely on intonation or prosody. These facts do not seem to be in line with the ‘front-loading’ expectation. Further light is thrown on these issues by studies of usage in corpora. In a study of ten languages, we found that those sentence-final particles are omitted or absent 40 per cent of the time in Lao and 70 per cent in Korean ( Enfield et al. 2010 ); two of the languages lacked any coding (including prosodic); and morphosyntactic coding as in English inversion is also mostly omitted. One can conclude that polar-question marking must carry low functional load, wherever it is located. These usage studies also showed that interrogatives (whether content or polar) only perform the function of seeking new information about 30 per cent of the time; around 40 per cent of them are involved in repair or checking or confirming just-given information, and the remaining 30 per cent perform many different functions, including offers, requests, and so on.

To summarize so far: there is no one-to-one match of form to function. Even where apparently dedicated morphosyntactic machinery exists to code speech acts (as in interrogatives), the coding may be omitted: about 60–70 per cent (in various corpora) of English polar questions are unmarked declaratives in form, and do not carry rising intonation ( Geluykens 1988 ). Cross-linguistically, the tendency is for two thirds or more of all questions (in a broad sense) to be polar questions (unpublished data from Stivers et al. 2009 ). Even though wh - or content questions would seem to require a wh -form, this is not necessarily true; many languages have indefinite quantifiers that double as interrogative words, and many allow gaps to code the variable (as in John is going to _? instead of Where is John going? ).

There are then distinct limits to the bottom-up coding and inference of speech act force. Nevertheless, some detailed studies suggest that underlying the apparent many-to-many correspondences between utterance forms and speech acts there might be a clockwork system. For example, in a study of requests in English telephone calls, it was found that the Can you/Could you/Would you … forms are used for requests where the speaker has clear rights or entitlements and knows what the request would involve; where the entitlements are low and the contingencies involved less clear, the I wonder if form is preferred ( Drew and Curl 2008 ). This suggests that where multiple forms are available, they may each carry subtly different presuppositions about background conditions.

Nevertheless, it is more likely that the cues to illocutionary force are multiple and probabilistic in character. Indeed, there is now considerable work in natural-language processing (NLP) that seems to show this. This work takes speech corpora, usually from task-oriented dialogues, and tags them by hand with a very constrained set of speech act categories that seem to reflect the functions in each particular corpus. Machine-learning algorithms are then trained on a subcorpus, inducing the association between surface cues—lexical items, phrases, or intonation—and the pre-coded tags. The algorithm is then let loose on the rest of the corpus to see how well it emulates the human tagging. So, for example, it was found that ‘assessments’ (value judgements like ‘That was great’ that usually call for a response in kind) have quite restricted elements ( Goodwin 1996 ): that as subject in 80 per cent of cases, intensifiers really or pretty , and adjectives drawn from a short list including great, good, nice, wonderful … etc. ( Jurafsky 2004 ). So a combination (an unstructured list) of surface cues may be a crude but very effective trigger for speech act categorization: the chances of being an assessment given just one cue like really might be low, but in combination with that and great may be greatly increased. This would be just the kind of low-level associative process that could rapidly deliver probabilities of speech act assignment in comprehension, and since these cues are distributed throughout the turn, an incoming turn could be incrementally classified with increasing certainty.

Turning to top-down information, this includes all the accumulated contextual and sequential information that forms the niche for the incoming turn. For example, in service encounters, the goals for speaker and addressee will be largely pre-set, so that an utterance like Do you have coffee to go? can be understood directly as a request. In free conversation, though, the context is usually more local. One factor of constant relevance is the current state of the common ground between participants. We noted earlier that polar questions in English and many other languages are typically unmarked, and thus have the shape and often the prosody of declaratives. How then can they be understood as questions? As Labov and Fanshel (1977) pointed out, the recognition is done on the basis of knowledge asymmetry: thus You’re hungry is likely to be understood as a question, while You’re smart is likely to be interpreted as a compliment. Statements about what the other knows best are candidate questions, and this explains how a fifth of languages can do without any lexical or morphosyntactic marking of polar questions (prosody may often help of course, but in some languages it seems never to play this role; see e.g. Levinson (2010) on Yélî Dnye or Dryer (2011a) on Chalcatongo Mixtec). Epistemic asymmetry or symmetry is such a strong indicator that it can overrule interrogative marking: thus Isn’t it a beautiful day is not likely to be interpreted as a question, since we can all be presumed to have access to the weather. Heritage (2012) argues that epistemic status trumps question marking in all cases.

A second always relevant factor is sequential location in the sequence of turns. The power of sequential location to map illocutionary force onto utterances can be appreciated from a number of angles. Consider as a limiting case silence, where there is literally no signal, yet the silence can imply a response, as in the following example where the two-second silence is taken to imply ‘no’ and functions to block a forthcoming request:

The inference relies on the ‘conditional relevance’ of a second pair part and on the principle that dispreferred responses are typically delayed or mitigated. Another way to appreciate the power of sequence to attribute speech act force is to consider cases where ambiguities arise, as in the following example (8) where the arrowed turn is ambiguous ( Schegloff 1988 ). It could be a straight question, or it could be a pre-announcement—that is, an offer to tell conditional on the recipient indicating that he doesn’t know the indicated news. Note that the question force is not the ‘literal force’ (a question about knowledge), but a question about who is going. Pre-announcements often have this form (cf. Do you know the joke about the plumber? ) and the pre-announcement reading is encouraged by the context, where Russ had produced a pre-announcement just before in the first line, and Mom could be reciprocating in kind. The ambiguity comes about because both readings are salient in the context.

A related type of high-level information can also be brought to bear on the interpretation of a turn, namely an assessment of how the turn fits into the likely goal structure or plan of the speaker. For this is the inference schema we use to understand any sequence of actions: if you are sitting opposite and grasp your mug and lift it up, I’ll expect you to put it to your mouth and take a drink. The sub-actions I see (grasping the mug, lifting it) are preconditions to the action I infer (taking a sip), and seeing the initial parts I can make the metonymic inference to the whole. Interestingly, the same pattern of inference works for speech acts. Consider the following service encounter in example (9), where a precondition to buying pecan Danish pastries is queried, and the seller responds both to the question and the underlying request.

Notice however that no request has been issued, so how exactly does this work? Consider the analysis sketched in (10), in terms of customer C’s plans and the seller S’s reconstruction of them from the first utterance in the sequence. From Do you have pecan Danish today the seller can infer that this is a precondition on asking for some, therefore the request is likely to follow—given which the seller can truncate the sequence as she does, by responding to the foreseeable forthcoming request (in the dotted box in the figure in (10)). It is this projected request that gives Do you have pecan Danish today its pre-request flavour; in this way speech acts can acquire multiple actions mapped onto one turn by virtue of projectable next actions.

Notice this account explains why mentioning a felicity condition on a speech act is one way of performing that speech act (this is the classical theory of ‘indirect speech acts’, as in Searle 1975 ). But it has much wider application. Consider the telephone exchange in (11): the caller C in line 3 queries what the recipient is doing, which is a potential prequel to an invitation. The response in line 4 not only answers the query but at the same makes clear that there is no impediment to an invitation, thus projecting an acceptance. The lamination of actions throughout this sequence is straightforwardly explicable in terms of current action plus foreseeable next action, as sketched in the figure in (12).

The virtues of this mode of analysis become especially clear when one considers cases like the following where the main actions are projected, but never actually performed.

Here there is no feasible ‘indirect speech act’ in terms of classical felicity conditions: there is rather an indication of a predicament which would have an obvious solution, while the recipient produces an account for why the obvious solution cannot be performed. In the same sort of way, in example (6), Mom’s Just to throw away? performs four actions, as question, repair initiator, challenge, and pre-rejection because it is transparent that Mom intends to resist Virginia’s claim for more weekly pocket money by countering Virginia’s every move. Neither indirect speech act theory nor the conversation analyst’s notion of one action being the ‘vehicle’ for another (as in Schegloff 2007a ) can explain this kind of quadruple depth of speech act lamination on a single turn.

Plan reconstruction as an account of speech act comprehension was first advanced by Allen (1979) and Cohen and Perrault (1979) and applied to the problem of indirect speech acts by Allen and Perrault (1980) (see also Clark 1979 , Levinson 1981 ). These approaches in classical Artificial Intelligence style make use of the heavily intentional approach favoured by Grice and reviewed in section 10.1 , cranking through a calculus of desire and belief to arrive at a final ‘indirect speech act’ ( Cohen et al. 1990 ). The insights can be understood, however, in a slightly different way, in terms of an utterance being designed to reveal, variously, the whole or part of the iceberg of underlying interactional goals, where projectable next turns serve to laminate one or more ‘indirect speech acts’ onto the current turn.

Both bottom-up cues, which may be just probabilistic associations of linguistic features and speech acts, together with top-down factors like the role of sequence, epistemic asymmetries, and plan attribution, almost certainly play a role together in speech act comprehension. Curiously, cases where interlocutors misunderstand one another as in (8) are vanishingly rare. But there is no complete model of how these various kinds of information come together in action attribution.

10.8 Syntax, Sentence Types, and the Grammar of Speech Acts

We return now to the grammar of speech acts. We’ve noted that in general there is no one-to-one mapping between form and function. This is especially true of the ‘big three’ sentence types, declarative, interrogative, and imperative, which are probably best seen as carrying a very general semantics (e.g. a wh- interrogative expresses an open proposition with a blank constituent, which is why the same form may double as an indefinite expression in many languages). However, as discussed above under the rubric of cues, there can be many surface elements that will help to narrow down an illocutionary force. There are for example adverbs like please that unambiguously mark requests or pleadings, adverbs like obviously or frankly that mark statements ( Gordon and Lakoff 1971 ), and interjections like Wow, My God that mark exclamations. In addition there are minor sentence types that are indeed specialized for illocutionary force ( Sadock and Zwicky 1985 ). A classic case are exclamatives, where English has rich specialized constructional resources as in What a beautiful day!, That it should come to this!, Why, if it isn’t the trouble maker!, You and your linguistics!, Of all the stupid things to do!, To think I nearly won a medal! (well described in grammars like Quirk et al. 1989 ). Exclamatives are a category of some typological interest (see Michaelis 2001 , who defines them semantically and finds them often coded in quasi-interrogative or topic constructions or NP complements). Similarly, English codes wishes as optatives ( If only I’d done it, May the best man win, Oh to be in England ), and suggestions or proposals in special forms ( How about joining us?, What if you came earlier?, Let’s go, Why not have a drink? ). Many other languages have their own specialized forms for warnings, blessings, and the like. Unfortunately, studies of the usages of these forms are still few and far between, so we cannot be sure they are as specialized in usage as the grammars suggest—but it is an important subject for future research.

10.9 Conclusions—The Centrality of Speech Acts

The central function of language, it has been argued, is to deliver speech acts ( Searle 1972 ). The rest of the linguistic apparatus, with all of its complex syntax and propositional structure, is there to serve this purpose. For speech acts are the coin of conversation, and conversation the core niche for language use and acquisition. A retort might be that the central function of missiles is to target explosives, but this doesn’t help one understand much about the inner complex engineering of a missile—the outer function can be remote from design details, partly because there may be innumerable different engineering solutions that would answer the same function. Linguistics then would be effectively autonomous from the study of speech acts. What has been argued here, however, is that such a disjunction is unlikely to be tenable. First, language design has to accommodate to the tight constraints of conversation, so that speech acts have to be decoded early partly from bottom-up aspects of the signal—hence constructions of many different kinds serve this purpose, if often in a non-deterministic way. Second, the very clausal structure of language is almost certainly due to the tight turn constraints into which sentences must fit, where each turn must deliver at least one speech act. Third, whatever one’s views on the origin of language, short turns delivering speech acts were almost certainly a design feature of protolanguage—languages have evolved within this ecological niche, spinning complexity in the tight confines of the turn.

Another way to appreciate the centrality of speech acts in language design is to appreciate how many of the features we think of as most intimately connected to language structure are actually also exhibited in the sequential organization of speech acts. Consider recursion, argued by Chomsky ( 2007 , 2010 ) to be the most central design feature exclusive to language. Now consider that the clearest type of recursion, namely centre-embedding, is restricted in language to just two, occasionally three, levels of nesting. Karlsson (2007) found no examples of triple embedding in huge corpora, and just 13 in the whole history of Western literature; for spoken language, the limit is two. Since small numbers of centre-embeddings can easily be modelled with a finite state device, there is poor evidence for the need for phrase structure grammars here. Yet centre-embedding within discourse shows none of these limits, and is sufficiently multiple and routine to provide a much better basis for escalation to phrase structure grammars. Here is a simple example of one-degree centre-embedding:

Since this can be recursively elaborated, we could express the indefinite recursion by the rule: Q&A →Q (Q&A) A (Levinson 1981 , 2006 ; Koschmann 2010 ). The following shows an example with degree-three internal embedding (each level numbered), a level exceeding all syntactic embedding in spoken languages (the speech acts, or adjacency pairs, here relevant are request + compliance, question + answer, and two repair initiator + repairs).

It is easy to show that degree-six or more centre-embedding occurs in spoken dialogue (see Levinson 2013b ). When one finds a domain where a capacity is more evolved than in another domain, there is reason to assume that it has a longer evolutionary history. While short-term memory constraints are often invoked to explain our failure to produce centre-embedding in syntax, these do not seem to be a constraint in the interactive domain. This would suggest that linguistic recursion at least partly originates from this type of push-down stack in action sequencing, which as far as we know is universal in dialogue. Incidentally, it is also possible to show that cross-serial dependencies can be found in the sequential structure of speech acts, showing once again that complexity attributed to syntax may be more easily found in dialogue structure. All in all, a better case can be made for the need to climb the Chomsky hierarchy of grammars based on speech acts in dialogue than on syntactic structure.

For all the reasons outlined in this article, speech acts are a fundamentally important area of study in the language sciences. Work in this domain has been relatively, and inexplicably, neglected since the 1970s and 1980s, and it is time for a renaissance of work on speech acts and their use in dialogue. 3

A possible exception are ‘outlouds’ or ‘response cries’ like private exclamations ( Goffman 1978 ), which may be produced with or without an audience, but by definition without an addressee.

‘Recognition’ presupposes correct attribution that matches speaker intent, but since we are interested in the comprehension process which will include occasional misattributions, ‘attribution’ is the more accurate term.

My thanks to Penelope Brown and Kobin Kendrick for helpful comments on the manuscript.

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Speech Acts and Conversation

Language use: functional approaches to syntax, language in use, sentence structure and the function of utterances, speech acts, the cooperative principle, violations of the cooperative principles, politeness conventions, speech events, the organization of conversation, cross-cultural communication.

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

'Speech Acts' (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics, 2017)

2017, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics

Speech acts are acts that can, but need not, be carried out by saying and meaning that one is doing so. Many view speech acts as the central units of communication, with phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of an utterance serving as ways of identifying whether the speaker is making a promise, a prediction, a statement, or a threat. Some speech acts are momentous, since an appropriate authority can, for instance, declare war or sentence a defendant to prison, by saying that he or she is doing so. Speech acts are typically analyzed into two distinct components: a content dimension (corresponding to what is being said), and a force dimension (corresponding to how what is being said is being expressed). The grammatical mood of the sentence used in a speech act signals, but does not uniquely determine, the force of the speech act being performed. A special type of speech act is the performative, which makes explicit the force of the utterance. Although it has been famously claimed that performatives such as “I promise to be there on time” are neither true nor false, current scholarly consensus rejects this view. The study of so-called infelicities concerns the ways in which speech acts might either be defective (say by being insincere) or fail completely.

Related Papers

JOPR IAIN Salatiga

Global Journal of Research in Humanities & Cultural Studies

GJR Publication

Language is a tool for communication among humans. A study of speech act is essentially immersed in language use and interpretation. Participants of discourse convey their feelings, ideas and messages by skillfully using language according to contexts and situations. In this regard, speech acts are used to inform, persuade, describe and perform other intentional acts. This paper examines speech acts in terms of critical perspectives in the literature. After the pioneering work of Austin (cf. 1962), the study of “speech acts as actions” became popularized. This development informed classical and contemporary insights in the literature, resulting in speech act theories and taxonomies such as those of Searle (1969), Grice (1975), Bach and Harnish (1979), Adgbija (1982), Mey (2001), among others. This study concludes that speech acts are rule-governed, context-driven, universal and establish the link between pragmatics and semantics.

Daniel Harris , Daniel Fogal

A critical overview of the contemporary literature on speech-act theory. This is the introductory chapter of the forthcoming OUP volume, New Work on Speech Acts, edited by Daniel Fogal, Daniel W. Harris, and Matt Moss.

Dhanaji Nagane

Jerry Sadock

Sadock, Jerrold. 1994. Toward a Realistic Typology of Speech Acts. in S. L. Tsohatzidis, ed. Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives, 393-406. London: Routledge, In contrast to the largely unmotivated, highly redundant , and partially incoherent, classificatory systems that are found in the influential works of Austin and Searle, I suggest that a more reasonable typology of speech acts should be based on three independent aspects of what kinds of information are encoded when we speak. 1) First, there an informational, representational aspect in which conversational negotiations are conducted in terms of propositions that can be judged for accuracy against real or possible conditions. This dimension corresponds in a way to Grice's notion of what is said; 2) then there is an effective, social aspect by means of which conventional effects on societally determined features of the world are portrayed and often achieved that corresponds to Austin's notion of illocutions 3) and last an affective, emotive aspect that is used to give vent to and/or to display real or apparent feelings of the speaker . Here some of what Searle intends to capture in his sincerity conditions is encoded. I will suggest that some of the most ordinary speech act types are characterized by very basic values in each of these motivated dimensions.

Virginia Dutto

Loftur Árni Björgvinsson

This paper examines J.L. Austin's theory regarding speech acts, or how we do things with words. It starts by reviewing the birth and foundation of speech act theory as it appeared in the 1955 William James Lectures at Harvard before going into what Austin's theory is and how it can be applied to the real world. The theory is explained and analysed both in regards to its faults and advantages. Proposals for the improvement of the theory are then developed, using the ideas of other scholars and theorists along with the ideas of the author. The taxonomy in this essay is vast and various concepts and conditions are introduced and applied to the theory in order for it to work. Those conditions range from being conditions of appropriateness through to general principles of communication. In this essay utterances are examined by their propositional content, the intention of the utterance, and its outcome. By studying how utterances are formed and issued, along with looking into utterance circumstances and sincerity, one can garner a clear glimpse into what constitutes a performative speech act and what does not. By applying the ideas of multiple thinkers in unison it becomes clear that a) any one single theory does not satisfyingly explain all the intricacies of the theory and b) most utterances which are not in the past tense can be considered to be either performative or as having some performative force.

Forthcoming in Oxford Bibliographies Online

Mitch Green

Lodz Papers in Pragmatics

Iwona Plisiecka

RELATED PAPERS

Raul Correia

Revista de Estudios Internacionales Mediterráneos

LAURENCE MARIE ANGE THIEUX

Allan Gottlieb

Vichai Sinchaiyaphum

Domu Simbolon

International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control

Ignacio Peñarrocha

Hematology, Transfusion and Cell Therapy

Terezinha de Jesus Marques Salles

Nuclear Physics B - Proceedings Supplements

Kah-Yoong Chan

Neurologia i Neurochirurgia Polska

Maciej Bujko

Jim Roder Pinedo Greenwich

Journal of the International AIDS Society

Oluwapelumi Aliu

Review of Information Engineering and Applications

Sania Bhatti

Georgia Pe-piper

Iván Antonio González

Tópicos de marketing

Katherine Rozo Cuadros

Julia Panades

Antica terra d'Abruzzo

raffaella papi

Buana Bastra

Agung Pramujiono

Depta Avriani

International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications

Engr Farooq Khan

Addiction Research &amp; Theory

Jacques Barber

International Congress Series

Anuradha Chakraborti

Journal of Psychosomatic Research

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

• school Campus Bookshelves
• menu_book Bookshelves
• perm_media Learning Objects
• login Login
• how_to_reg Request Instructor Account
• hub Instructor Commons
• Download Page (PDF)
• Download Full Book (PDF)
• Periodic Table
• Physics Constants
• Scientific Calculator
• Reference & Cite
• Tools expand_more
• Readability

selected template will load here

This action is not available.

10.4: Indirect speech acts across languages

• Last updated
• Save as PDF
• Page ID 138678

• Paul Kroeger
• Dallas International University via Language Library Press

Searle states that his analysis of indirect speech acts as conventions of usage helps to explain why the intended illocutionary force is sometimes preserved in translation, and sometimes not. (This again is very different from the idiomatic meanings of normal idioms, which generally do not survive in translation.) He points out that literal translations of a question like Can you help me? would be understood as requests in French and German, but not in Czech. The reason that the intended force is sometimes preserved in translation is that indirect speech acts are calculable. They are motivated by Gricean principles which are widely believed to apply to all languages, subject to a certain amount of cultural variation. The reason that the intended force is not always preserved in translation is that indirect speech acts are partly conventionalized, and different languages may choose to conventionalize different specific forms.

It is often difficult for non-native speakers to recognize and correctly interpret indirect speech acts in a second language. Wierzbicka (1985: 175), for example, states: “Poles learning English must be taught the potential ambiguity of would you – sentences, or why don’t you – sentences, just as they must be taught the polysemy of the word bank .” This has been a major area of research in second language acquisition studies, and most scholars agree that this is a significant challenge even for advanced learners of another language.

There is less agreement concerning whether the same basic principles govern the formation of indirect speech acts in all languages. Numerous studies have pointed out cross-linguistic differences in the use of specific linguistic features, preferred or conventionalized patterns for specific speech acts, cultural variation in ways of showing politeness, contexts where direct vs. indirect speech acts are preferred, etc.

Wierzbicka (1985) argues that Searle’s analysis of indirect speech acts is not universally applicable, but reflects an Anglo-centric bias. She points out for example that English seems to be unusual in its strong tendency to avoid the use of the imperative verb form. The strategy of expressing indirect commands via questions is so strongly preferred that it is no longer a marker of politeness; it is frequently used (at least in Australian English) in impolite speech laced with profanity, obscenity, or other expressives indicating anger, contempt, etc. Kalisz (1992) agrees with many of Wierzbicka’s specific observations concerning differences between English and Polish, but argues that Searle’s basic claims about the nature of indirect speech acts are not disproven by these differences.

It is certainly true that there is a wide range of variation across languages in terms of what counts as an apology, promise, etc., and in the specific features that distinguish appropriate from inappropriate ways for performing a particular speech act. For example, Olshtain & Cohen (1989) recount the following incidents to illustrate differences in acceptable apologies between English and Israeli Hebrew:

One morning, Mrs G., a native speaker of English now living in Israel, was doing her daily shopping at the local supermarket. As she was pushing her shopping cart she unintentionally bumped into Mr Y., a native Israeli. Her natural reaction was to say “I’m sorry” (in Hebrew). Mr Y. turned to her and said, “Lady, you could at least apologize”. On another occasion the very same Mr Y. arrived late for a meeting conducted by Mr W. (a native speaker of English) in English. As he walked into the room he said “The bus was late”, and sat down. Mr W. obviously annoyed, muttered to himself “These Israelis, why don’t they ever apologize!” [Olshtain & Cohen 1989: 53]

In a similar vein, Egner (2002) shows that in many African cultures, a promise only counts as a binding commitment when it is repeated. Clearly there are many significant differences across languages in the conventional features of speech acts; but this does not necessarily mean that the underlying system which makes it possible to recognize and interpret indirect speech acts is fundamentally different.

Searle’s key insights are that indirect speech acts are a type of conversational implicature, and that the felicity conditions for the intended act play a crucial role in the interpretation of these implicatures. Given our current state of knowledge, it seems likely that these basic principles do in fact hold across languages. But like most cross-linguistic generalizations in semantics and pragmatics, this hypothesis needs to be tested across a wider range of languages.

Want a daily email of lesson plans that span all subjects and age groups?

Speech acts: constative and performative - colleen glenney boggs.

197,286 Views

4,867 Questions Answered

Let’s Begin…

When are words just words, and when do words force action? Linguist J.L. Austin divided words into two categories: constatives (words that describe a situation) and performatives (words that incite action). For instance, is a “No running” sign describing your gait, or are you not running because the sign prohibits it? Colleen Glenney Boggs describes how these categorizations give power to words and, ultimately, to your actions.

About TED-Ed Animations

TED-Ed Animations feature the words and ideas of educators brought to life by professional animators. Are you an educator or animator interested in creating a TED-Ed Animation? Nominate yourself here »

Meet The Creators

• Educator Colleen Glenney Boggs
• Animator Lou Webb
• Narrator Michelle Snow

More from Playing with Language

Why was the Rosetta Stone so important?

Lesson duration 05:17

359,716 Views

A brief history of Spanish

Lesson duration 05:22

388,951 Views

What makes a language... a language?

Lesson duration 04:57

750,595 Views

Who decides what’s in the dictionary?

Lesson duration 05:23

418,908 Views

Illocutionary Act

Making an Explicit Point

Jim Kruger / Getty Images

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

In speech-act theory , the term illocutionary act refers to the use of a sentence to express an attitude with a certain function or "force," called an  illocutionary force , which differs from locutionary acts in that they carry a certain urgency and appeal to the meaning and direction of the speaker. 

Although illocutionary acts are commonly made explicit by the use of performative verbs  like "promise" or "request," they can often be vague as in someone saying "I'll be there," wherein the audience cannot ascertain whether the speaker has made a promise or not.

In addition, as Daniel R. Boisvert observes in "Expressivism, Nondeclarative, and Success-Conditional Semantics" that we can use sentences to "warn, congratulate, complain, predict, command, apologize, inquire, explain, describe, request, bet, marry, and adjourn, to list just a few specific kinds of illocutionary act."

The terms illocutionary act and illocutionary force were introduced by British linguistic philosopher John Austin in 1962's "How to Do Things With Words, and for some scholars, the term illocutionary act is virtually synonymous with speech act .

Locutionary, Illocutionary, and Perlocutionary Acts

Acts of speech can be broken down into three categories: locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. In each of these, too, the acts can either be direct or indirect, which quantify how effective they are at conveying the speaker's message to its intended audience.

According to Susana Nuccetelli and Gary Seay's "Philosophy of Language: The Central Topics," locutionary acts are "the mere act of producing some linguistic sounds or marks with a certain meaning and reference," but these are the least effective means of describing the acts, merely an umbrella term for the other two which can occur simultaneously.

Speech acts can therefore further be broken down into illocutionary and perlocutionary wherein the illocutionary act carries a directive for the audience, such as promising, ordering, apologizing and thanking. Perlocutionary acts, on the other hand, bring about consequences to the audiences such as saying "I will not be your friend." In this instance, the impending loss of friendship is an illocutionary act while the effect of frightening the friend into compliance is a perlocutionary act.

Relationship Between Speaker and Listener

Because perlocutionary and illocutionary acts depend on the audience's reaction to a given speech, the relationship between speaker and listener is important to understand in the context of such acts of speech.

Etsuko Oishi wrote in "Apologies," that "the importance of the speaker's intention in performing an illocutionary act is unquestionable, but, in communication , the utterance becomes an illocutionary act only when the hearer takes the utterance as such." By this, Oishi means that although the speaker's act may always be an illocutionary one, the listener can choose to not interpret that way, therefore redefining the cognitive configuration of their shared outer world.

Given this observation, the old adage "know your audience" becomes especially relevant in understanding discourse theory, and indeed in composing a good speech or speaking well in general. In order for the illocutionary act to be effective, the speaker must use language which his or her audience will understand as intended.

• Speech Acts in Linguistics
• Locutionary Act Definition in Speech-Act Theory
• Speech Act Theory
• Perlocutionary Act Speech
• Illocutionary Force in Speech Theory
• Phonetic Prosody
• Felicity Conditions: Definition and Examples
• Performative Verbs
• Explicature (Speech Acts)
• Appropriateness in Communication
• Verbal Hedge: Definition and Examples
• Mental-State Verbs
• Coherence in Composition
• Information Content (Language)
• The Power of Indirectness in Speaking and Writing
• What Is a Rhetorical Device? Definition, List, Examples

Speech Acts

Speech acts are a staple of everyday communicative life, but only became a topic of sustained investigation, at least in the English-speaking world, in the middle of the Twentieth Century. [ 1 ] Since that time “speech act theory” has been influential not only within philosophy, but also in linguistics, psychology, legal theory, artificial intelligence, literary theory and many other scholarly disciplines. [ 2 ] Recognition of the importance of speech acts has illuminated the ability of language to do other things than describe reality. In the process the boundaries among the philosophy of language, the philosophy of action, the philosophy of mind and even ethics have become less sharp. In addition, an appreciation of speech acts has helped lay bare an implicit normative structure within linguistic practice, including even that part of this practice concerned with describing reality. Much recent research aims at an accurate characterization of this normative structure underlying linguistic practice.

1. Introduction

2.1 the independence of force and content, 2.2 can saying make it so, 2.3 seven components of illocutionary force, 3. illocutions and perlocutions, and indirect speech acts, 4. force, fit and satisfaction, 5.1 force conventionalism, 5.2. an objection to force conventionalism, 6.1 grice's account of speaker meaning, 6.2 objections to grice's account, 6.3 force as an aspect of speaker meaning, 7.1 speech acts and conversation analysis, 7.2 speech acts and scorekeeping, 8. force-indicators and the logically perfect language, 9. do speech acts have a logic, further reading, other internet resources, related entries.

One way of appreciating the distinctive features of speech acts is in contrast with other well-established phenomena within the philosophy of language. Accordingly in this entry I will consider the relation among speech acts and: semantic content, grammatical mood, speaker-meaning, logically perfect languages, perlocutions, performatives, presuppositions, and implicature. This will enable us to situate speech acts within their ecological niche.

Above I shuddered with quotation marks around the expression ‘speech act theory’. It is one thing to say that speech acts are a phenomenon of importance for students of language and communication; another to say that we have a theory of them. While, as we shall see below, we are able to situate speech acts within their niche, having a theory of them would enable us to explain (rather than merely describe) some of their most significant features. Consider a different case. Semantic theory deserves its name: For instance, with the aid of set-theoretic tools it helps us tell the difference between good arguments and bad arguments couched in ordinary language. By contrast, it is not clear that “speech act theory” has comparable credentials. One such credential would be a delineation of logical relations among speech acts, if such there be. To that end I close with a brief discussion of the possibility, envisioned by some, of an “illocutionary logic”.

2. Content, Force, and How Saying Can Make It So

Construed as a bit of observable behavior, a given act may be done with any of a variety of aims. I bow deeply before you. So far you may not know whether I am paying obeisance, responding to indigestion, or looking for a wayward contact lens. So too, a given utterance, such as ‘You'll be more punctual in the future,’ may leave you wondering whether I am making a prediction or issuing a command or even a threat. The colloquial question, “What is the force of those words?” is often used to elicit an answer. In asking such a question we acknowledge a grasp of what those words mean. However, given the dizzying array of uses of ‘meaning’ in philosophy and related cognitive sciences, I will here refer instead to content. While different theories of content abound (as sets of possible worlds, sets of truth conditions, Fregean senses, ordered n -tuples, to name a few), the phenomenon is relatively clear: What the speaker said is that the addressee will be more punctual in the future. The addressee or observer who asks, “What is the force of those words?” is asking, of that content, how it's to be taken–as a threat, as a prediction, or as a command. The addressee is not asking for a further elucidation of that content.

Or so it seems. Perhaps whether the utterance is meant as a threat, a prediction or a command will depend on some part of her content that was left unpronounced? According to this suggestion, really what she said was, “I predict you'll be more punctual,” or “I command you to be more punctual,” as the case may be. Were that so, however, she'd be contradicting herself in uttering ‘You'll be more punctual in the future’ as a prediction while going on to point out, ‘I don't mean that as a prediction.’ While such a juxtaposition of utterances is surely odd, it is not a self-contradiction, any more than “It's raining but I don't believe it,” is a self-contradiction when the left conjunct is put forth as an expression of belief. What is more, ‘I predict you'll be more punctual,’ is itself a sentence with a content, and will be being put forth with some force or other when–as per our current suggestion—the speaker says it in the course of making a prediction. So that sentence, ‘I predict you'll be more punctual’ is put forth with some force–say as an assertion. This implies, according to the present suggestion, that really the speaker said, ‘I assert that I predict that you'll be more punctual.’ Continuing this same style of reasoning will enable us to infer that performance of a single speech act requires saying–though perhaps not pronouncing—infinitely many things. That is reason for rejecting the hypothesis that implied it, and for the rest of this entry I will assume that force is no part of content.

In chemical parlance, a radical is a group of atoms normally incapable of independent existence, whereas a functional group is the grouping of those atoms in a compound that is responsible for certain of the compound's properties. Analogously, it is often remarked that a proposition is itself communicatively inert; for instance, merely expressing the proposition that snow is white is not to make a move in a “language game”. Rather, such moves are only made by putting forth a proposition with an illocutionary force such as assertion, conjecture, command, etc. The chemical analogy gains further plausibility from the fact that just as a chemist might isolate radicals held in common among various compounds, the student of language may isolate a common element held among ‘Is the door shut?’, ‘Shut the door!’, and ‘The door is shut’. This common element is the proposition that the door is shut, queried in the first sentence, commanded to be made true in the second, and asserted in the third. According to the chemical analogy, then:

Illocutionary force : propositional content :: functional group : radical

In light of this analogy we may see, following Stenius 1967, that just as the grouping of a set of atoms is not itself another atom or set of atoms, so too the forwarding of a proposition with a particular illocutionary force is not itself a further component of propositional content.

Encouraged by the chemical analogy, a central tenet in the study of speech acts is that content may remain fixed while force varies. Another way of putting the point is that the content of one's communicative act underdetermines the force of that act. That's why, from the fact that someone has said, “You'll be more punctual in the future,” we cannot infer the utterance's force. The force of an utterance also underdetermines its content: Just from the fact that a speaker has made a promise, we cannot deduce what she has promised to do. For these reasons, students of speech acts contend that a given communicative act may be analyzed into two components: force and content. While semantics studies the contents of speech acts, pragmatics studies, inter alia , their force. The bulk of this entry may be seen as an elucidation of force.

Need we bother with such an elucidation? That A is an important component of communication, and that A underdetermines B , do not justify the conclusion that B is an important component of communication. Content also underdetermines the decibel level at which we speak but this fact does not justify adding decibel level to our repertoire of core concepts for the philosophy of language. Why should force be thought any more worthy of admission to this set of core concepts than decibel level? One reason for an asymmetry in our treatment of force and decibel level is that the former, but not the latter, seems to be a component of speaker meaning : Force is a feature not of what is meant but of how it is meant; decibel level, by contrast, is a feature at most of the way in which something is said. This point is developed in Section 6 below.

Speech acts are not to be confused with acts of speech. One can perform a speech act such as issuing a warning without saying anything: A gesture or even a minatory facial expression will do the trick. So too, one can perform an act of speech, say by uttering words in order to test a microphone, without performing a speech act. [ 3 ] For a first-blush delineation of the range of speech acts, then, consider that in some cases we can make something the case by saying that it is. Alas, I can't lose ten pounds by saying that I am doing so, nor can I persuade you of a proposition by saying that I am doing so. On the other hand I can promise to meet you tomorrow by uttering the words, “I promise to meet you tomorrow,” and if I have the authority to do so, I can even appoint you to an office by saying, “I hereby appoint you.” (I can also appoint you without making the force of my act explicit: I might just say, “You are now Treasurer of the Corporation.” Here I appoint you without saying that I am doing so.) A necessary and, perhaps, sufficient condition of a type of act's being a speech act is that acts of that type can–whether or not all are—be carried out by saying that one is doing so.

Saying can make it so, but that is not to suggest that any old saying by any speaker constitutes the performance of a speech act. Only an appropriate authority, speaking at the appropriate time and place, can: christen a ship, pronounce a couple married, appoint someone to an administrative post, declare the proceedings open, or rescind an offer. Austin, in How To Do Things With Words, spends considerable effort detailing the conditions that must be met for a given speech act to be performed felicitously . Failures of felicity fall into two classes: misfires and abuses . The former are cases in which the putative speech act fails to be performed at all. If I utter, before the QEII, “I declare this ship the Noam Chomsky,” I have not succeeded in naming anything simply because I lack the authority to do so. My act thus misfires in that I've performed an act of speech but no speech act. Other attempts at speech acts might misfire because their addressee fails to respond with an appropriate uptake : I cannot bet you $100 on who will win the election unless you accept that bet. If you don't accept that bet, then I have tried to bet but have not succeeded in betting.

Some speech acts can be performed–that is, not misfire—while still being less than felicitous. I promise to meet you for lunch tomorrow, but haven't the least intention of keeping the promise. Here I have promised all right, but the act is not felicitous because it is not sincere. My act is, more precisely, an abuse because although it is a speech act, it fails to live up to a standard appropriate for a speech act of its kind. Sincerity is a paradigm condition for the felicity of speech acts. Austin foresaw a program of research in which individual speech acts would be studied in detail, with felicity conditions elucidated for each one. [ 4 ]

Here are three further features of the “saying makes it so” condition. First, the saying appealed to in the “saying makes it so” test is not an act of speech: My singing in the shower, “I promise to meet you tomorrow for lunch,” when my purpose is simply to enjoy the sound of my voice, is not a promise, even if you overhear me. Rather, the saying (or singing) in question must itself be something that I mean. We will return in Section 6 to the task of elucidating the notion of meaning at issue here.

Second, the making relation that this “saying makes it so” condition appeals to needs to be treated with some care. My uttering, “I am causing molecular agitation,” makes it the case that I am causing molecular agitation. Yet causing molecular agitation is not a speech act on any intuitive understanding of that notion. One might propose that the notion of making at issue here marks a constitutive relation rather than a causal relation. That may be so, but as we'll see in Section 5, this suggests the controversial conclusion that all speech acts depend for their existence on conventions over and above those that imbue our words with meaning.

Finally, the saying makes it so condition has a flip side. Not only can I perform a speech act by saying that I am doing so, I can also rescind that act later on by saying (in the speech act sense) that I take it back. I cannot, of course, change the past, and so nothing I can do on Wednesday can change the fact that I made a promise or an assertion on Monday. However, on Wednesday I may be able to retract a claim I made on Monday. I can't take back a punch or a burp; the most I can do is apologize for one of these infractions, and perhaps make amends. By contrast, not only can I apologize or make amends for a claim I now regret; I can also take it back. Likewise, you may allow me on Wednesday to retract the promise I made to you on Monday. In both these cases of assertion and promise, I am no longer beholden to the commitments that the speech acts engender in spite of the fact that the past is fixed. Just as one can, under appropriate conditions, perform a speech act by saying that one is doing so, so too one can, under the right conditions, retract that very speech act.

Searle and Vanderveken 1985 distinguish between those illocutionary forces employed by speakers within a given linguistic community, and the set of all possible illocutionary forces. While a certain linguistic community may make no use of a force such as conjecturing or appointing, these two are among the set of all possible forces. (These authors appear to assume that while the set of possible forces may be infinite, it has a definite cardinality.) Searle and Vanderveken go on to define illocutionary force in terms of seven features, claiming that every possible illocutionary force may be identified with a septuple of such values. The features are:

1. Illocutionary point : This is the characteristic aim of each type of speech act. For instance, the characteristic aim of an assertion is to describe how things are; the characteristic point of a promise is to commit oneself to a future course of action.

2. Degree of strength of the illocutionary point : Two illocutions can have the same point but differ along the dimension of strength. For instance, requesting and insisting that the addressee do something both have the point of attempting to get the addressee to do that thing; however, the latter is stronger than the former.

3. Mode of achievement : This is the special way, if any, in which the illocutionary point of a speech act must be achieved. Testifying and asserting both have the point of describing how things are; however, the former also involves invoking one's authority as a witness while the latter does not. To testify is to assert in one's capacity as a witness. Commanding and requesting both aim to get the addressee to do something; yet only someone issuing a command does so in her capacity as a person in a position of authority.

4. Propositional content conditions : Some illocutions can only be achieved with an appropriate propositional content. For instance, I can only promise what is in the future and under my control. I can only apologize for what is in some sense under my control and already the case. For this reason, promising to make it the case that the sun did not rise yesterday is not possible; neither can I apologize for the truth of Snell's Law.

5. Preparatory conditions : These are all other conditions that must be met for the speech act not to misfire. Such conditions often concern the social status of interlocutors. For instance, a person cannot bequeath an object unless she already owns it or has power of attorney; a person cannot marry a couple unless she is legally invested with the authority to do so.

6. Sincerity conditions : Many speech acts involve the expression of a psychological state. Assertion expresses belief; apology expresses regret, a promise expresses an intention, and so on. A speech act is sincere only if the speaker is in the psychological state that her speech act expresses.

7. Degree of strength of the sincerity conditions : Two speech acts might be the same along other dimensions, but express psychological states that differ from one another in the dimension of strength. Requesting and imploring both express desires, and are identical along the other six dimensions above; however, the latter expresses a stronger desire than the former.

Searle and Vanderveken suggest, in light of these seven characteristics, that each illocutionary force may be defined as a septuple of values, each of which is a “setting” of a value within one of the seven characteristics. It follows, according to this suggestion, that two illocutionary forces F 1 and F 2 are identical just in case they correspond to the same septuple.

I cannot lose ten pounds by saying that I am doing so, and I cannot convince you of the truth of a claim by saying that I am doing so. However, these two cases differ in that the latter, but not the former, is a characteristic aim of a speech act. One characteristic aim of assertion is the production of belief in an addressee, whereas there is no speech act one of whose characteristic aims is the reduction of adipose tissue. A type of speech act can have a characteristic aim without each speech act of that type being issued with that aim: Speakers sometimes make assertions without aiming to produce belief in anyone, even themselves. Instead, the view that a speech act-type has a characteristic aim is akin to the view that a biological trait has a function. The characteristic role of wings is to aid in flight, but some flightless creatures have wings.

Austin called these characteristic aims of speech acts perlocutions (1962, p. 101). I can both urge and persuade you to shut the door, yet the former is an illocution while the latter is a perlocution. How can we tell the difference? We can do this by noting that one can urge by saying, “I urge you to shut the door,” while there are no circumstances in which I can persuade you by saying, “I persuade you to shut the door.” A characteristic aim of urging is, nevertheless, the production of a resolution to act. (1962, p. 107)

Perlocutions are characteristic aims of one or more illocution, but are not themselves illocutions. Nevertheless, a speech act can be performed by virtue of the performance of another one. For instance, my remark that you are standing on my foot is normally taken as, in addition, a demand that you move; my question whether you can pass the salt is normally taken as a request that you do so. These are examples of so-called indirect speech acts (Searle 1975b).

Indirect speech acts are less common than might first appear. In asking whether you are intending to quit smoking, I might be taken as well to be suggesting that you quit. However, while the embattled smoker might indeed jump to this interpretation, we do well to consider what evidence would mandate it. After all, while I probably would not have asked whether you intended to quit smoking unless I hoped you would quit, I can evince such a hope without suggesting anything. Similarly, the advertiser who tells us that Miracle Cream reversed hair loss in Bob, Mike, and Fred, also most likely hopes that I will believe it will reverse my own hair loss. That does not show that he is (indirectly) asserting that it will. Whether he is asserting this depends, it would seem, on whether he can be accused of being a liar if in fact he does not believe that Miracle Cream will staunch my hair loss.

Whether, in addition to a given speech act, I am also performing an indirect speech act would seem to depend on my intentions. My question whether you can pass the salt is also a request that you do so only if I intend to be so understood. My remark that Miracle Cream helped Bob, Mike and Fred is also an assertion that it will help you only if I intend to be so committed. What is more, these intentions must be feasibly discernible on the part of one's audience. Even if, in remarking on the fine weather, I intend as well to request that you pass the salt, I have not done so. I need to make that intention manifest in some way.

How might I do this? One way is by virtue of inference to the best explanation. All else being equal, the best explanation of my asking whether you can pass the salt is that I mean to be requesting that you do so. All else equal, the best explanation of my remarking that you are standing on my foot, particularly if I use a stentorian tone of voice, is that I mean to be demanding that you desist. By contrast, it is doubtful that the best explanation of my asking whether you intend to quit smoking is my intention to suggest that you do so. Another explanation at least as plausible is my hope that you do so. Bertolet 1994, however, develops an even more skeptical position than that suggested here, arguing that any alleged case of an indirect speech act can be construed just as an indication, by means of contextual clues, of the speaker's intentional state–hope, desire, etc., as the case may be. Postulation of a further speech act beyond what has been (relatively) explicitly performed is explanatorily unmotivated.

These considerations suggest that indirect speech acts, if they do occur, can be explained within the framework of conversational implicature–that process by which we mean more than we say, but in a way not due exclusively to the conventional meanings of our words. Conversational implicature, too, depends both upon communicative intentions and the availability of inference to the best explanation. (Grice, 1989). In fact, Searle's 1979b account of indirect speech acts was in terms of conversational implicature. The study of speech acts is in this respect intertwined with the study of conversations; we return to this connection in Section 7.

Force is often characterized in terms of the notions of direction of fit and conditions of satisfaction. The first of these may be illustrated with an example derived from Anscombe (1963). A woman sends her husband to the grocery store with a list of things to get; unbeknownst to him he is also being trailed by a detective concerned to make a list of what the man buys. By the time the husband and detective are in the checkout line, their two lists contain exactly the same items. The contents of the two lists is the same, yet they differ along another dimension. For the contents of the husband's list guide what he puts in his shopping cart. Insofar, his list exhibits world-to-word direction of fit : It is, so to speak, the job of the items in his cart to conform to what is on his list. By contrast, it is the job of the detective's list to conform with the world, in particular to what is in the husband's cart. As such, the detective's list has word-to-world direction of fit : The onus is on those words to conform to how things are. Speech acts such as assertions and predictions have word-to-world direction of fit, while speech acts such as commands have world-to-word direction of fit.

Not all speech acts appear to have direction of fit. I can thank you by saying “Thank you,” and it is widely agreed that thanking is a speech act. However, thanking seems to have neither of the directions of fit we have discussed thus far. Similarly, asking who is at the door is a speech act, but it does not seem to have either of the directions of fit we have thus far mentioned. Some would respond by construing questions as a form of imperative (e.g., “Tell me who is at the door!”), and then ascribing the direction of fit characteristic of imperatives to questions. This leaves untouched, however, banal cases such as thanking or even, “Hooray for Arsenal!” Some authors, such as Searle and Vanderveken 1985, describe such cases as having “null” direction of fit. That characterization is evidently distinct from saying such speech acts have no direction of fit at all. (The characterization is thus analogous to the way in which some non-classical logical theories describe some proposition as being neither True nor False, but as having a third truth value, N : Evidently that is not to say that such propositions are bereft of truth value.) It is difficult to discern from such accounts how one sheds light on a speech act in characterizing it as having a null direction of fit, as opposed to having no direction of fit at all. [ 5 ]

Direction of fit is also not so fine-grained as to enable us to distinguish speech acts meriting different treatment. Consider asserting that the center of the Milky Way is inhabited by a black hole, as opposed to conjecturing that the center of the Milky Way is so inhabited. These two acts seem subject to norms: The former purports to be a manifestation of knowledge, while the latter does not. This is suggested by the fact that it is appropriate to reply to the assertion with, “How do you know?”, while that is not an appropriate response to the conjecture. (Williamson 1996) Nevertheless, both the assertion and conjecture have word-to-world direction of fit. Might there be other notions enabling us to mark differences between speech acts with the same direction of fit? This is not to say that the difference between assertion and conjecture cannot be expressed as a difference among Searle and Vanderveken's seven components of illocutionary force; for instance that difference might be thought of as a difference in parameter 2, namely the degree of strength of illocutionary point. Rather, what we are seeking is an account of, rather than a label for, that difference.

One suggestion might come from the related notion of conditions of satisfaction . This notion generalizes that of truth. As we saw in 2.3, it is internal to the activity of assertion that it aims to capture how things are. When an assertion does so, not only is it true, it has hit its target; the aim of the assertion has been met. A similar point may be made of imperatives: It is internal to the activity of issuing an imperative that the world is enjoined to conform to it. The imperative is satisfied just in case it is fulfilled. Assertions and imperatives both have conditions of satisfaction–truth in the first place, and conformity in the second. In addition, it might be held that questions have answerhood as their conditions of satisfaction: A question hits its target just in case it finds an answer, typically in a speech act, performed by an addressee, such as an assertion that answers the question posed. Like the notion of direction of fit, however, the notion of conditions of satisfaction is too coarse-grained to enable us to make some valuable distinctions among speech acts. Just to use our earlier case again: An assertion and a conjecture that P have identical conditions of satisfaction, namely that P be the case. May we discern features distinguishing these two speech acts, and that may enable us to make finer-grained distinctions among other speech acts as well? I shall return to this question in Section 7.

5. Mood, Force and Convention

Just as content underdetermines force and force underdetermines content; so too even grammatical mood together with content underdetermine force. ‘You'll be more punctual in the future’ is in the indicative grammatical mood, but as we have seen that fact does not determine its force. The same may be said of other grammatical moods. Although I overhear you utter the words, ‘shut the door’, I cannot infer yet that you are issuing a command. Perhaps instead you are simply describing your own intention, in the course of saying, “I intend to shut the door.” If so, you've used the imperative mood without issuing a command. So too with the interrogative mood: I overhear your words, ‘who is on the phone.’ Thus far I don't know whether you've asked a question. After all, you may have so spoken in the course of stating, “John wonders who is on the phone.” Might either or both of initial capitalization or final punctuation settle the issue? Apparently not: What puzzles John is the following question: Who is on the phone?

Mood together with content underdetermine force. On the other hand it is a plausible hypothesis that grammatical mood is one of the devices we use, together with contextual clues, intonation and so on to indicate the force with which we are expressing a content. Understood in this weak way, it is unexceptionable to construe the interrogative mood as used for asking questions, the imperatival mood as used for issuing commands, and so on. So understood, we might go on to ask how speakers indicate the force of their speech acts given that grammatical mood and content cannot be relied on alone to do so.

One well known answer we may term force conventionalism . According to a strong version of this view, for every speech act that is performed, there is some convention that will have been invoked in order to make that speech act occur. This convention transcends those imbuing words with their literal meaning. Thus, force conventionalism implies that in order for use of ‘I promise to meet you tomorrow at noon,’ to constitute a promise, not only must the words used possess their standard conventional meanings, there must also exist a convention to the effect that the use, under the right conditions, of some such words as these constitutes a promise. J.L. Austin, who introduced the English-speaking world to the study of speech acts, seems to have held this view. For instance in his characterization of “felicity conditions” for speech acts, Austin holds that for each speech act

There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances… (1962, p. 14).

Austin's student Searle follows him in this, writing

…utterance acts stand to propositional and illocutionary acts in the way in which, e.g., making an X on a ballot paper stands to voting. (1969, p. 24)

Searle goes on to clarify this commitment in averring,

…the semantic structure of a language may be regarded as a conventional realization of a series of sets of underlying constitutive rules, and …speech acts are acts characteristically performed by uttering sentences in accordance with these sets of constitutive rules. (1969, p. 37)

Searle espouses a weaker form of force conventionalism than does Austin in leaving open the possibility that some speech acts can be performed without constitutive rules; Searle considers the case of a dog requesting to be let outside (1969, p. 39). Nevertheless Searle does contend that speech acts are characteristically performed by invoking constitutive rules.

Force-conventionalism, even in the weaker form just adumbrated, has been challenged by Strawson, who writes,

I do not want to deny that there may be conventional postures or procedures for entreating: one can, for example, kneel down, raise one's arms, and say, “I entreat you.” But I do want to deny that an act of entreaty can be performed only as conforming to such conventions….[T]o suppose that there is always and necessarily a convention conformed to would be like supposing that there could be no love affairs which did not proceed on lines laid down in the Roman de la Rose or that every dispute between men must follow the pattern specified in Touchstone's speech about the countercheck quarrelsome and the lie direct. (1964, p. 444)

Strawson contends that rather than appealing to a series of extra-semantic conventions to account for the possibility of speech acts, we explain that possibility in terms of our ability to discern one another's communicative intentions. What makes an utterance of a sentence in the indicative mood a prediction rather than a command, for instance, is that it is intended to be so taken; likewise for promises rather than predictions. This position is compatible with holding that in special cases linguistic communities have instituted conventions for particular speech acts such as entreating and excommunicating.

Intending to make an assertion, promise, or request, however, is not enough to perform one of these acts. Those intentions must be efficacious. The same point applies to cases of trying to perform a speech act, even when what one is trying to do is clear to others. This fact emerges from reflecting on an oft-quoted passage from Searle:

Human communication has some extraordinary properties, not shared by most other kinds of human behavior. One of the most extraordinary is this: If I am trying to tell someone something, then (assuming certain conditions are satisfied) as soon as he recognizes that I am trying to tell him something and exactly what it is I am trying to tell him, I have succeeded in telling it to him. (1969, p. 47.)

An analogous point would not apply to the act of sending : Just from the facts that I am trying to send my addressee something, and that he recognizes that I am trying to do so (and what it is I am trying to send him), we cannot infer that I have succeeded in sending it to him. However, while Searle's point about telling looks more plausible at first glance than would a point about sending, it also is not accurate. Suppose I am trying to tell somebody that I love her, and that she recognizes this fact on the basis of background knowledge, my visible embarrassment, and my inability to get past the letter ‘l’. Here we cannot infer that I have succeeded in avowing my love for her. Nothing short of coming out and saying it will do. Similarly, it might be common knowledge that my moribund uncle is trying, as he breathes his last, to bequeath me his fortune; still, I won't inherit a penny if he expires before saying what he was trying to. [ 6 ]

The gist of these examples is not the requirement that words be uttered in every speech act–we have already observed that speech acts can be performed silently. Rather, its gist is that speech acts involve intentional undertaking of one or another form of commitment; further, that commitment is not undertaken simply by virtue of my intending to undertake it, even when it is common knowledge that this is what I am trying to do. Can we, however, give a more illuminating characterization of the relevant intentions than merely saying that, for instance, to assert P one must intentionally put forth P as an assertion? [ 7 ] Strawson (1964) proposes that we can do so with aid of the notion of speaker meaning–a topic to which I now turn.

6. Speaker-Meaning and Force

As we have seen, that A is an important component of communication, and that A underdetermines B , do not justify the conclusion that B is an important component of communication. One reason for an asymmetry in our treatment of force and decibel level is that the former, but not the latter, seems to be a component of speaker meaning. I intend to speak at a certain volume, and sometimes succeed, but in most cases it is no part of what I mean that I happen to be speaking at the volume that I do. On the other hand, the force of my utterance is part of what I mean. It is not, as we have seen, part of what I say–that notion being closely associated with content. However, whether I mean what I say as an assertion, a conjecture, a promise or something else will be a feature of how I mean what I do.

Let us elucidate this notion of speaker meaning (née non-natural meaning). In his influential 1957 article, Grice distinguished between two senses of ‘mean’. One sense is exemplified by remarks such as ‘Those clouds mean rain,’ and ‘Those spots mean measles.’ The notion of meaning in play in such cases Grice dubs ‘natural meaning’. Grice suggests that we may distinguish this sense of ‘mean’ from another sense of the word more relevant to communication, exemplified in such utterances as

In saying “You make a better door than a window”, George meant that you should move,

In gesticulating that way, Salvatore means that there's quicksand over there,

Grice used the term ‘non-natural meaning’ for this sense of ‘mean’, and in more recent literature this jargon has been replaced with the term ‘speaker meaning’. [ 8 ] After distinguishing between natural and (what we shall heretofore call) speaker meaning, Grice attempts to characterize the latter. It is not enough that I do something that influences the beliefs of an observer: In putting on a coat I might lead an observer to conclude that I am going for a walk. Yet in such a case it is not plausible that I mean that I am going for a walk in the sense germane to speaker meaning. Might performing an action with an intention of influencing someone's beliefs be sufficient for speaker meaning? No: I might leave Smith's handkerchief at the crime scene to make the police think that Smith is the culprit. However, whether or not I am successful in getting the authorities to think that Smith is the culprit, in this case it is not plausible that I mean that Smith is the culprit.

What is missing in the handkerchief example is the element of overtness. This suggests another criterion: Performing an action with the, or an, intention of influencing someone's beliefs, while intending that this very intention be recognized. Grice contends that even here we do not have enough for speaker meaning. Herod presents Salome with St. John's severed head on a charger, intending that she discern that St. John is dead and intending that this very intention of his be recognized. Grice observes that in so doing Herod is not telling Salome anything, but is instead deliberately and openly letting her know something. Grice concludes that Herod's action is not a case of speaker meaning either. The problem is not that Herod is not using words; we have already considered hunters who mean things wordlessly. The problem seems to be that to infer what Herod intends her to, Salome does not have to take his word for anything. She can see the severed head for herself if she can bring herself to look. By contrast, in its central uses, telling requires a speaker to intend to convey information (or alleged information) in a way that relies crucially upon taking her at her word. Grice appears to assume that at least for the case in which what is meant is a proposition (rather than a question or an imperative), speaker meaning requires a telling in this central sense. What is more, this last example is a case of performing an action with an intention of influencing someone's beliefs, even while intending that this very intention be recognized; yet it is not a case of telling. Grice infers that it is not a case of speaker meaning either.

Grice holds that for speaker meaning to occur, not only must one (a) intend to produce an effect on an audience, and (b) intend that this very intention be recognized by that audience, but also (c) one must intend this effect on the audience to be produced at least in part by their recognition of the speaker's intention. The intention to produce a belief or other attitude by means (at least in part) of recognition of this very intention, has come to be called a reflexive communicative intention .

It has, however, been shown that intentions to produce cognitive or other effects on an audience are not necessary for speaker meaning. Davis 1992 offers many cases of speaker meaning in the absence of reflexive communicative intentions. Indeed, he forcefully argues that speaker meaning can occur without a speaker intending to produce any beliefs in an audience. [ 9 ] [ 10 ] Instead of intentions to produce certain effects in an audience, some authors have proposed that speaker meaning is a matter of overtly indicating some aspect of oneself. (Green, 2007). Compare my going to the closet to take out my overcoat (not a case of speaker meaning), with the following case: After heatedly arguing about the weather, I march to the closet while beadily meeting your stare, then storm out the front door while ostentatiously donning the coat. Here it's a lot more plausible that I mean that it's raining outside, and the reason seems to be that I am making some attitude of mine overt: I am not only showing it, I am making clear my intention to do just that.

How does this help to elucidate the notion of force? One way of asserting that P , it seems, is overtly to manifest my commitment to P , and indeed commitment of a particular kind: commitment to defend P in response to challenges of the form, “How do you know that?” I must also overtly manifest my liability to be either right or wrong on the issue of P depending on whether P is the case. By contrast, I conjecture P by overtly manifesting my commitment to P in this same “liability to error” way; but I am not committed to responding to challenges demanding justification. I must, however, give some reason for believing P ; this much cannot, however, be said of a guess.

We perform a speech act, then, when we overtly commit ourselves in a certain way to a content–where that way is an aspect of how we speaker-mean that content. One way to do that is to invoke a convention for undertaking commitment; another way is overtly to manifest one's intention to be so committed. We may elucidate the relevant forms of commitment by spelling out the norms underlying them. We have already adumbrated such an approach in our discussion of the differences among asserting and conjecturing. Developing that discussion a bit further, compare

• conjecturing

All three of these acts have word-to-world direction of fit, and all three have conditions of satisfaction mandating that they are satisfied just in case the world is as their content says it is. Further, one who asserts, conjectures, or guesses that P is right or wrong on the issue of P depending on whether P is in fact so. However, as we move from left to right we find a decreasing order of stringency in commitment. One who asserts P lays herself open to the challenge, “How do you know that?”, and she is obliged to retract P if she is unable to respond to that challenge adequately. By contrast, this challenge is inappropriate for either a conjecture or a guess. On the other hand, we may justifiably demand of the conjecturer that she give some reason for her conjecture; yet not even this much may be said of one who makes a guess. (The “educated guess” is intermediate between these two cases.)

We may think of this illocutionary dimension of speaker meaning as characterizing not what is meant, but rather how it is meant. Just as we may consider your remark, directed toward me, “You're tired,” and my remark, “I'm tired,” as having said the same thing but in different ways; so too we may consider my assertion of P , followed by a retraction and then followed by a conjecture of P , as two consecutive cases in which I speaker-mean that P but do so in different ways. This idea will be developed a bit further in Section 9 under the rubric of “mode” of illocutionary commitment.

Speaker meaning, then, applies not just to content but also to force, and we may elucidate that claim with a further articulation of the normative structure characteristic of each speech act: When you overtly display a commitment characteristic of that speech act, you have performed that speech act. Is this a necessary condition as well? That depends on whether I can perform a speech act without intending to do so—a topic for Section 9 below. For now, however, compare the view at which we have arrived with Searle's view that one performs a speech act when others become aware of one's intention, or at least one's attempt, to perform that act. What is missing from Searle's characterization is the notion of overtness: The agent in question must not only make her intention to undertake a certain commitment manifest; she must also intend that that very intention be manifest. There is more to overtness than wearing one's heart (or mind) on one's sleeve.

7. Force, Norms, and Conversation

In elucidating this normative dimension of force, we have brought speech acts into their conversational context. That is not to say that speech acts can only be performed in the setting of a conversation: I can approach you, point out that your vehicle is blocking mine, and storm off. Here I have made an assertion but have not engaged in a conversation. Perhaps I can ask myself a question in the privacy of my study and leave it at that–not continuing into a conversation with myself. However, it might reasonably be held that a speech act's ecological niche is nevertheless the conversation. In that spirit, while we may be able to remove it from its environment and scrutinize it in isolated captivity, doing so may leave us blind to some of its distinctive features.

This ecological analogy sheds light on a dispute over the question whether speech acts can profitably be studied in isolation from the conversations in which they occur. An empiricist framework, exemplified in John Stuart Mill's, A System of Logic , suggests attempting to discern the meaning of a word, for instance a proper name, in isolation. By contrast, Gottlob Frege (1884) enjoins us to understand a word's meaning in terms of the contribution it makes to an entire sentence. Such a method is indispensable for a proper treatment of such expressions as quantifiers, and represents a major advance over empiricist approaches. Yet students of speech acts have espoused going even further, insisting that the unit of significance is not the proposition but the speech act. Vanderveken writes,

Illocutionary acts are important for the purpose of philosophical semantics because they are the primary units of meaning in the use and comprehension of natural language. (Vanderveken, 1990, p. 1.)

Why not go even further, since speech acts characteristically occur in conversations? Is the unit of significance really the debate, the colloquy, the interrogation?

Students of so-called conversation analysis have contended precisely this, remarking that many speech acts fall naturally into pairs. [ 11 ] For instance, questions pair naturally with assertions when the latter purport to be answers. Likewise, offers pair naturally with acceptances or rejections, and it is easy to multiply examples. Searle, who favors studying speech acts in isolation, has replied to these considerations (Searle 1992). There he issues a challenge to students of conversation to provide an account of conversations parallel to that of speech acts, arguing as well that the prospects for such an account are dim. One of his reasons is that unlike speech acts conversations do not as such have a point or purpose. More recently, Asher and Lascardes 2003 have defended a more systematic treatment of speech acts in their conversational setting that responds to Searle's challenge.

Much literature concerned with speech acts is curiously disconnected from certain traditions flowing from work in the semantics of natural language emphasizing pragmatic factors. For instance, Stalnaker (1972, 1973, 1974) Lewis (1979, 1980), Thomason (1990) and others have developed models of the evolution of conversations aimed at understanding the role of quantification, presupposition (both semantic and pragmatic), anaphora, deixis, and vagueness in discourse. Such models typically construe conversations as involving an ever-developing set of propositions (construed as the conversational “common ground”) that can be presupposed by interlocutors. (Such propositions may, but need not be, understood as sets of possible worlds.) Other parameters characterizing a conversation at a given point include the domain of discourse, a set of salient perceptible objects, standards of precision, time, world or situation, speaker, addressee, and so forth. The set of all values for these items at a given conversational moment is often referred to as “conversational score”.

“Scorekeeping” approaches to language use typically construe a contribution to a conversation as a proposition: If that “assertion” is accepted, then the score is updated accordingly. Little attention is paid to the question whether that proposition is put forth as a conjecture, guess, assertion, or supposition for the sake of argument. An enrichment of the scorekeeping model would do just this. Accordingly Green 1999 attempts a synthesis of some aspects of this scorekeeping model, Gricean pragmatics, and concepts pertaining to speech acts.

Frege's Begriffschrift constitutes history's first thoroughgoing attempt to formulate a rigorous formal system. However, Frege did not see his Begriffschrift as merely a tool for assessing the validity of arguments. Rather, he appears to have seen it as an organon for the acquisition of knowledge from unquestionable first principles; in addition he wanted to use it in order to help make clear the epistemic foundations on which our knowledge rests. To this end his formal system contains not only symbols indicating the content of propositions (including logical constants), but also symbols indicating the force with which they are put forth. In particular, Frege insists that when using his formal system to acquire new knowledge from proposition already known, we use an assertion sign to indicate our acknowledgment of the truth of the proposition used as axioms or inferred therefrom. Frege thus employs what would now be called a force indicator : an expression whose use indicates the force with which an associated proposition is being put forth. (Green 2002).

Reichenbach expands upon Frege's idea in his 1947. In addition to using an assertion sign, Reichenbach also uses indicators of interrogative and imperatival force. Hare similarly introduces force indicators to lay bare the way in which ethical and cognate utterances are made (Hare 1970). Davidson, however, challenges the value of this entire enterprise, arguing that since natural language already contains many devices for indicating the force of one's speech act, the only interest in a force indicator would be if it could guarantee the force of one's speech act. But nothing could: Any device purporting to be, say, an infallible indicator of assertoric force is liable to being used by a joker or actor to heighten the realism of her performance:

It is easy to see that merely speaking the sentence in the strengthened mood cannot be counted on to result in an assertion; every joker, storyteller, and actor will immediately take advantage of the strengthened mood to simulate assertion. There is no point, then, in the strengthened mood; the available indicative does as well as language can do in the service of assertion (Davidson 1979, p. 311).

Dummett 1993 and Hare 1989 reply to Davidson. Hare in particular remarks that there could be a society with a convention that utterance of a certain expression constituted performance of a certain illocutionary act. Green 1997 questions the relevance of this observation to the issue of illocutionary acts, which, as we have seen, seem to require intentions for their performance. Just as no convention could make it the case that I believe that P (though perhaps a convention could make it the case that people say I believe that P ), so too no convention could make it the case that I intend to put forth a certain sentence as an assertion.

On the other hand, Green 1997 and Green 2000 also observe that even if there can be no force indicator in the sense Davidson criticizes, nothing prevents natural language from containing devices that indicate force conditional upon one's performing a speech act: Such a force indicator would not show whether one is performing a speech act, but, given that one is doing so, which speech act one is performing. For instance, parenthetical expressions such as, ‘as is the case’ can occur in the antecedent of conditionals, as in: ‘If, as is the case, the globe is warming, then Greenland will melt.’ Use of the parenthetical cannot guarantee that the sentence or any part of it is being asserted, but if the entire sentence is being asserted, then, Green claims, use of the parenthetical guarantees that the speaker is committed to the content of the antecedent. If that claim is correct, natural language already contains force indicators in this qualified sense. Whether it is worth introducing such force indicators into a logical notation remains an open question.

Students of speech acts contend, as we have seen, that the unit of communicative significance is the speech act rather than the proposition. This attitude prompts the question whether logic itself might be enriched by incorporating inferential relations among speech acts rather than just inferential relations among propositions. Since particulars cannot stand in inferential relations to one another, no such relations could obtain between individual speech acts. However, just as two events E 1 and E 2 (such as running quickly and running) could be logically related to one another in that it is not possible for one to occur without the other; so too speech act types S 1 and S 2 could be inferentially related to one another if it is not possible to perform one without performing the other. A warning that the bull is about to charge is also an assertion that the bull is about to charge but the converse is not true. This is in spite of the fact that these two speech acts have the same propositional content: That the bull is about to charge. If, therefore, warning implies asserting but not vice versa, then that inferential relation is not to be caught within the net of inferential relations among propositions.

In their Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (1985), Searle and Vanderveken attempt a general treatment of logical relations among speech acts. They describe their central question in terms of commitment:

A theory of illocutionary logic of the sort we are describing is essentially a theory of illocutionary commitment as determined by illocutionary force. The single most important question it must answer is this: Given that a speaker in a certain context of utterance performs a successful illocutionary act of a certain form, what other illocutions does the performance of that act commit him to? (1985, p. 6)

To explicate their notion of illocutionary commitment, these authors invoke their definition of illocutionary force in terms of the seven values mentioned in Section 2.3 above. On the basis of this definition, they define two notions pertinent to entailment relations among speech acts, namely strong illocutionary commitment and weak illocutionary commitment . According to the former definition, an illocutionary act S 1 commits a speaker to another illocutionary act S 2 iff it is not possible to perform S 1 without performing S 2 . Whether that relation holds between a pair of illocutionary acts depends on the particular septuples with which they are identified. Thus suppose that S 1 is identical with <IP 1 , Str " , Mode 1 , Cont 1 , Prep 1 , Sinc 1 , Stresinc 1 > (corresponding to illocutionary point, strength, mode of achievement, propositional content, preparatory condition, sincerity condition, and strength of sincerity condition, respectively); and suppose that S 2 is identical with <IP 1 , Str $ , Mode 1 , Cont 1 , Prep 1 , Sinc 1 , Stresinc 1 >. Suppose further that Str " and Str $ differ only in that " is stronger than $. Then it will not be possible to perform S 1 without performing S 2 ; whence the former strongly illocutionarily implies the latter. (This definition of strong illocutionary commitment generalizes in a straightforward way to the case in which a set of speech acts S 1 , …, S n -1 implies a speech act S n .)

Performance of a speech act or set of speech acts can also commit an agent to a distinct content, and do so relative to some force. If P and Q jointly imply R , then my asserting both P and Q commits me to R . That is not to say that I have also asserted R : If assertion were closed under deduction I would assert infinitely many things just by virtue of asserting one. By contrast, if I conjecture P and Q , then I am once again committed to R but not in the way that I would have been had I asserted P and Q . For instance, in the assertion case, once my further commitment to R is made clear, it is within the rights of my addressee to ask how I know that R holds; this would not have been an acceptable reply to my merely conjecturing P and Q .

To explicate this relation, Searle and Vanderveken define weak illocutionary commitment: S 1 weakly illocutionarily implies S 2 iff every performance of S 1 commits an agent to meeting the conditions laid down in the septuple identical to S 2 (1985, p. 24). Searle and Vanderveken infer that this implies that if P logically entails Q , and an agent asserts P , then she is committed to believing that Q . These authors stress, however, that this does not mean that the agent who asserts P is committed to cultivating the belief Q when P implies Q . In lieu of that explication, however, it is unclear just what notion of commitment is at issue. It is unclear, for instance, what it could mean to be committed to believing Q (rather than just being committed to Q ) if this is not to be explicated as being committed to cultivating the belief that Q .

Other approaches attempt to circumvent such problems by reductively defining the notion of commitment in terms of obligations to action and liability to error and/or vindication. Let S be an arbitrary speaker, < ⊢ l A l , …, ⊢ n A n , ⊢ B > a sequence of force/content pairs; then:

<⊢ l A l , …, ⊢ n A n , ⊢ B > is illocutionarily valid iff if speaker S is committed to each A i under mode ⊢ i , then S is committed to B under mode ⊢. [ 12 ]

Because it concerns what force/content pairs commit an agent to what others, illocutionary validity is an essentially deontic notion: It will be cashed out in terms either of obligation to use a content in a certain way conversationally, or liability to error or vindication depending upon how the world is.

Our discussion of the possibility of an illocutionary logic answers one question posed at the end of Section 6.3, namely whether it is possible to perform a speech act without intending to do so. This seems likely given Searle and Vanderveken's definition of strong illocutionary commitment: We need only imagine an agent performing some large number of speech acts, S 1 , …, S n -1 , which, unbeknownst to her, jointly guarantee that she fulfills the seven conditions defining another speech act S n . Evidently such a “strict liability” conception still requires that one performs S n only by virtue of intentionally performing some other set of speech acts S 1 , …, S n -1 ; it is difficult to see how one can perform S n while having no intention of performing a speech act at all.

We have also made progress on a question raised in Section 1, namely whether “speech act theory” deserves its name. An appropriate definition of illocutions would enable us to explain, rather than merely describe, some features of speech acts. Vanderveken 1990 offers a set of tableaux depicting inferential relations among speech acts. For instance, the following is a fragment of his tableaux for assertives–speech acts whose illocutionary point is to describe how things are:

castigate  reprimand  accuse  blame  criticize  assert  suggest

where strong illocutionary validity moves from left to right. This is because all these speech acts have the illocutionary point of describing how things are, but the propositional content conditions and degree of strength of illocutionary point conditions become increasingly less stringent as we move from left to right. Accounts of this sort offer hope of our being able informatively answer such questions whether someone who castigates an addressee for some state of affairs is also assertorically committed to the obtaining of that state of affairs. Might we discover “illocutionary tautologies”, “illocutionary absurdities” and other phenomena that could shed light on such utterances as “This very utterance is an assertion”, “I doubt this very claim”? Affirmative answers to such questions will be needed if we are to justify our use of “speech act theory”.

Bibliography

• Alston, W. (2000) Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• –––. 1994: ‘Illocutionary Acts and Linguistic Meaning,’ in Tsohatzidis (ed.), pp. 29-49.
• Anscombe, G.E.M. (1963) Intention, 2 nd Edition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Armstrong, D. (1971) ‘Meaning and communication’. The Philosophical Review 80 : 427-47.
• Asher, N. and A. Lascarides 2003: Logics of Conversation . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Austin, J.L. (1962). How To Do Things With Words , 2 nd Edition, ed. J.O. Urmson and M. Sbisá. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––. (1970) Philosophical Papers , Edited by J. Urmson, and G. Warnock. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Avramides, A. (1989) Meaning and Mind: An Examination of the Gricean Account of Language . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Bach, K. 1975: ‘Performatives are statements too’, Philosophical Studies 28 : 229-36.
• –––. 1994: ‘Conversational impliciture,’ Mind and Language 9 : 124-162.
• –––, and R. Harnish (1979) Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.
• Barker, S. (2004). Renewing Meaning: A Speech-Act Theoretic Approach . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Belnap, N., T. Steel, 1976: The Logic of Questions and Answers. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Bennett, J. (1976) Linguistic Behaviour . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bertolet, R. 1994: ‘Are There Indirect Speech Acts?’ in in S. Tsohatzidis (ed.) Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives (London: Routledge), pp. 335-49.
• Brandom, R. (1983). ‘Asserting.’ Noûs 17: 637-650.
• Brandom, R (1994) Making It Explicit , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Carston, R. (2003) Thoughts and Utterances . Oxford: Blackwell.
• Clark, H. (1996) Using Language , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Cohen, ‘Do Illocutionary Forces Exist?’ The Philosophical Quarterly 14 : 18-137.
• Davidson, D. (1979) ‘Moods and Performances’. Reprinted in Davidson (1984) Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation . (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
• Davis, W. 1992: ‘Speaker meaning,’ Linguistics and Philosophy 15 : 223-53.
• –––. (2003) Meaning, Expression and Thought . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Dummett, M.A.E. (1973) Frege: Philosophy of Language. London: Duckworth.
• –––. (1993) ‘Mood, force and convention,’ in his The Seas of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 202-23.
• Forguson, L.W. 1973. “Locutionary and illocutionary acts”. In G. Warnock (ed), Essays on J. L. Austin . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 160–185.
• Dummett, M. 1993: “Mood, Force and Convention”, in his The Seas of Language (Oxford), pp. 202-23.
• Frege, G. [1879] 1976: Begriffsschrift in van Heijenoort (ed.) From Frege to Gödel: A Sourcebook in Mathematical Logic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 1-82.
• Frege, G. (1884) The Foundations of Arithmentic , trans. J.L. Austen. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• –––. (1979) Posthumous Writings H. Hermes, F. Kambartel and F. Kaulbach (eds.) (Blackwell).
• –––. (1980) Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence , G. Gabriel, et al eds. (Chicago).
• –––. (1984) ‘The thought: A logical inquiry.’ Collected Papers on Mathematics Logic and Philosophy . Edited by B. McGuinness, trans. by M. Black et al . Oxford: Blackwell.
• Frye, M. 1976. “On saying”. American Philosophical Quarterly 13: 123–127.
• –––. 1973: ‘Force and meaning,’ Journal of Philosophy 70 : 281-94.
• Geach, P. (1972) ‘Assertion.’ Reprinted in his Logic Matters , Oxford: Blackwell: pp. 254-269.
• Gorman, D. (1999) The Use and Abuse of Speech-act Theory in Criticism. Poetics Today 20 : 93-119.
• Ginet, C. (1979) ‘Performativity’. Linguistics and Philosophy 3 : 245-65.
• Green, M. (1997) ‘On the Autonomy of Linguistic Meaning’. Mind , 106 : 217-244.
• –––. (1999) ‘Illocutions, Implicata, and What a Conversation Requires’. Pragmatics & Cognition 7 : 65-92.
• –––. (2000) ‘Illocutionary Force and Semantic Content’. Linguistics and Philosophy 23 : 435-473.
• –––. (2002) ‘The Inferential Significance of Frege's Assertion Sign’. Facta Philosophica , 4 : 201-29.
• –––. (2007). Self-Expression . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Grice, H.P. (1957) “Meaning”, The Philosophical Review 66, No. 3: 377-88.
• ––– (1989) Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Hajdin, M. (1991) ‘Is There More to Speech Acts Than Illocutionary Force and Propositional Content?’ Nous, 25 : 353-7.
• Hamblin, C.L. (1987) Imperatives. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• Hare, R. (1970) ‘Meaning and Speech Acts’. The Philosophical Review , 79 , pp. 3-24.
• –––. (1989) ‘Some Subatomic Particles of Logic’, Mind , 98 , pp. 23-37.
• Harrah, D. (1980) ‘On speech acts and their logic,’ Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 61 : 204-11.
• –––. (1994) ‘On the vectoring of speech acts,’ in S. Tsohatzidis (ed.) Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives (London: Routledge), pp. 374-392.
• Holdcroft, D. (1994): ‘Indirect Speech Acts and Propositional Content,’ in S. Tsohatzidis (ed.) Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives (London: Routledge), pp. 350-64.
• Humberstone, L. (1992) ‘Direction of fit’. Mind 101: 59–83.
• Kearns, J. (1997) ‘Propositional Logic of Supposition and Assertion’, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 38 : 325–349.
• –––. (1999) ‘An Illocutionary Logical Explanation of the Surprise Execution’, History and Philosophy of Logic 20 : 195-214.
• –––. (2006) ‘Conditional Assertion, Denial, and Supposition as Illocutionary Acts,’ Linguistics and Philosophy 29 : 455-85.
• Lewis, D. (1979) ‘Scorekeeping in a Language Game’. Journal of Philosophical Logic 8, pp. 339-59. Reprinted in Lewis 1983.
• Lewis, D. (1980) ‘Index, Context, and Content’. In Stig Kanger and Sven Ohman (Eds.), Philosophy and Grammar . Dordrecht: Reidel. Reprinted in David Lewis, 1998, Papers in Philosophical Logic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Lewis, D. (1983) Philosophical Papers Volume I . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• McDowell, J. (1980) ‘Meaning, communication, and knowledge.’ Reprinted in Meaning, Knowledge and Reality . Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Meggle, G. (1985) ‘To hell with speech act theory,’ in M. Dascal (ed.) Dialogue (Benjamins): 205-11.
• Mulligan, K. (ed) (1987) Speech Act and Sachverhalt: Reinach and the Foundations of Realist Phenomenology . Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhof.
• Parret, H. and J. Verschueren (eds.) (1991) (On) Searle on Conversation . Amsterdam: J. Benjamins.
• Pendlebury, M. (1986) ‘Against the power of force: reflections on the meaning of mood,’ Mind 95 : 361-372.
• Recanati, F. (1987) Meaning and Force: The Pragmatics of Performative Utterances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Reichenbach, H. (1947): Elements of Symbolic Logic . New York: Macmillan.
• Reinach, A. (1913) ‘Die apriorischen Grunglagen des bürgerlichen Rechtes,’ Jahrbuch fur Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 2 : 685-847.
• Sbisa, M. (1995) ‘Speech act theory,’ in J. Verschueren, J. Östman, and J. Blommaert (eds.) Handbook of Pragmatics . John Benjamins, 495-506.
• Schiffer, S. (1972) Meaning . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Schuhmann, K. and Smith, B. 1990. ‘Elements of speech act theory in the philosophy of Thomas Reid,’ History of Philosophy Quarterly 7 : 47–66.
• Searle, J. (1968) ‘Austin on locutionary and illocutionary acts’. The Philosophical Review 77 : 405–424.
• –––. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––. (1975a) ‘A taxonomy of illocutionary acts’. In K. Gunderson (ed), Language, Mind and Knowledge . Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 344–369.
• –––. (1975b) ‘Indirect speech acts’. In Syntax and Semantics, 3: Speech Acts , ed. P. Cole & J. L. Morgan, pp. 59–82. New York: Academic Press.
• –––. (1979) ‘Indirect Speech Acts,’ in his Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––. (1986a). ‘Meaning, communication, and representation’. In R. Grandy and R. Warner (eds), Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 209–226.
• –––. (1986b) ‘Notes on conversation’. In D.G. Ellis and W. A. Donohue (eds), Contemporary Issues in Language and Discourse Processes . Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates 7–19.
• –––. (1989) ‘How performatives work’. Linguistics and Philosophy 12 : 535–558.
• –––. (1992) ‘Conversation’. In H. Parrett and J. Verschueren (eds.) (On) Searle on Conversation . New York: Benjamins, 7-30.
• –––. (1999) Mind, Language, and Society: Doing Philosophy in the Real World . London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
• –––. ,and D. Vanderveken (1985) Foundations of Illocutionary Logic . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Smith, B. (1990) ‘Toward a history of speech act theory’. In A. Burkhardt (ed), Speech Acts, Meaning and Intentions: Critical Approaches to the Philosophy of John Searle . Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 29–61.
• –––. (ed). 2003. John Searle . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Stalnaker, R. (1972) ‘Pragmatics’. In D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.) Semantics of Natural Language . Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 380-397.
• –––. (1973) ‘Presuppositions’. Journal of Philosophical Logic 2: 447-457.
• –––. (1974) ‘Pragmatic Presuppositions’. In M. Munitz and P. Unger (eds.) Semantics and Philosophy . New York: NYU Press, 197-213.
• –––. (1984) Inquiry . Cambridge, MA: MIT.
• Stenius, E. (1967) ‘Mood and language-game’, Synthese 17 : 254-274.
• Strawson, P. (1950). ‘On referring’. Mind 59: 320-44.
• –––(1964) ‘Intention and convention in speech acts’, The Philosophical Review 73 : 439-60, reprinted in Strawson, Logico-Linguistic Papers . London: Methuen, 1971.
• –––. (1970) Meaning and truth. Reprinted in Strawson, Logico-Linguistic Papers . London: Methuen 1971.
• –––. (1973) ‘Austin and ‘locutionary meaning’’. In G.Warnock (ed), Essays on J. L. Austin , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 46–68.
• Thomason, R. (1990) ‘Accommodation, meaning and implicature: interdisciplinary foundations for pragmatics’. In Cohen, Morgan and Pollock (eds.), Intentions in Communication . Cambridge, MA: MIT. 325-364.
• Tsohatzidis, S.L. (ed.) (1994) Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives (Routledge)
• Vanderveken, D. (1990). Meaning and Speech Acts, Vols I and II (Cambridge).
• Vendler, Z. 1972: Res Cogitans (Cornell).
• Watson, G. 2004: ‘Asserting and Promising,’ Philosophical Studies 117 : 57-77
• Williamson, T. (1996). ‘Knowing and asserting.’ The Philosophical Review 105: 489-523.
• Dummett, M. Origins of Analytic Philosophy (Harvard).
• Furberg, M. 1971. Saying and Meaning: A Main Theme in J. L. Austin's Philosophy . Oxford: Blackwell.
• Grewendorf, G. and G. Meggle (eds.) 2002: Speech Acts, Mind and Social Reality (Dordrecht: Kluwer).
• Holdcroft, D. 1978. Words and Deeds: Problems in the Theory of Speech Acts. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Lepore, E. and van Gulick, R. (eds). 1991. John Searle and his Critics . Oxford: Blackwell.
• Warnock, G. Ed. 1973: Essays on J. L. Austin . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Warnock, G. 1989: J. L. Austin . New York: Routledge.
• Research project in the philosophy of language , maintained at the University of Berne, Switzerland. This site is devoted to some main themes of research stemming from Grices' work on speaker meaning and implicature.
• Working Papers in Lingustics , University College London.
• ‘ Toward a history of speech act theory ’, a paper by Barry Smith (SUNY/Buffalo).

anaphora | assertion | Frege, Gottlob | Grice, Paul | implicature | -->meaning, theories of --> | pragmatics | -->presupposition --> | propositional attitude reports | propositions | vagueness

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Elsevier Sponsored Documents

Linguistic signs in action: The neuropragmatics of speech acts

• • Speech acts are embedded in actions and settings defining the function they convey.
• • These include the action sequence, structure commitments, and other social pragmatic aspects.
• • Rapid neural processing of pragmatic features in parallel with semantic information.
• • Specific cortical areas reflect the processing of specific pragmatic features.

What makes human communication exceptional is the ability to grasp speaker’s intentions beyond what is said verbally. How the brain processes communicative functions is one of the central concerns of the neurobiology of language and pragmatics. Linguistic-pragmatic theories define these functions as speech acts, and various pragmatic traits characterise them at the levels of propositional content, action sequence structure, related commitments and social aspects. Here I discuss recent neurocognitive studies, which have shown that the use of identical linguistic signs in conveying different communicative functions elicits distinct and ultra-rapid neural responses. Interestingly, cortical areas show differential involvement underlying various pragmatic features related to theory-of-mind, emotion and action for specific speech acts expressed with the same utterances. Drawing on a neurocognitive model, I posit that understanding speech acts involves the expectation of typical partner follow-up actions and that this predictive knowledge is immediately reflected in mind and brain.

1. Pragmatics and the brain

Language is a communication system that allows us to efficiently express our intentions to others. Yet, the processes by which a listener grasps speaker’s intentions, which often go beyond the uttered expression ( Grice, 1957 , Levinson, 1983 , Wittgenstein, 1953 ), are still an open matter. This is because there is a many-to-many relationship between the linguistic utterance and the various possible functions it may have in communicative interactions ( Ehlich, 2007 , Fritz, 2013 , Wittgenstein, 1953 ). For instance, the expression “here is an apple” can be used to teach someone the meaning of a word, to draw attention to a particular object or to offer that object upon request. To capture the pragmatic meaning of a linguistic utterance in social interactions, several processes are at work at the linguistic, contextual, and social levels ( Grice, 1975 , Levinson, 1983 , Noveck and Sperber, 2004 ). These processes have long been researched in philosophy and linguistics, but only in recent decades has it become a field of research in neuroscience known as “Neuropragmatics” ( Bambini et al., 2011 , Bara et al., 1997 , Cutica et al., 2006 , Gambi et al., 2015 , Hagoort and Levinson, 2014 , Levinson, 2016 , Noveck, 2018 , Sauerland and Schumacher, 2016 , Soroker et al., 2005 ). Substantial linguistic and neurocognitive research has focused on cases where pragmatic processing is most pronounced, that is, in non-literal meanings, including indirect speech, metaphors, irony and humour ( Bambini et al., 2011 , Bambini et al., 2019 , Boux et al., 2022 , Canal and Bambini, 2020 , Coulson, 2008 , Eviatar and Just, 2006 ), on the study of Gricean conversational implicatures ( Benz and Gotzner, 2021 , Degen and Tanenhaus, 2011 , Feng et al., 2021 , Gotzner et al., 2018 , Hartshorne et al., 2015 , Noveck and Posada, 2003 , Zhan et al., 2017 ) or addressing social and pragmatic deficits in various clinical populations ( Bambini et al., 2022 , Baron-Cohen, 1988 , Carotenuto et al., 2018 , Deliens et al., 2018 , Holtgraves and Giordano, 2017 , Soroker et al., 2005 ). Further research has focused on the organisation and structure of conversations, which have yielded important insights on how human social interactions are organised in sequences (e.g., Kendrick et al., 2020 , Levinson, 2013 , Schegloff, 2007 ), where linguistic signs (words and sentences along with non-verbal communication, such as gestures) are used as a tool of communication to carry out linguistic actions, the so-called speech acts. Recent research has discovered novel brain signatures underlying pragmatic features of speech acts at the level of propositional content, action sequence structure, related commitments, and social aspects. The present paper focuses specifically on these recent advances concerning the neural processes of speech acts. I start by outlining standard linguistic-pragmatic theories along with a detailed description of the relevant pragmatic features that distinguish between speech act types. This is followed by a description of a neurocognitive model, the “Action Prediction Theory of Communicative Function”, which provides an explanation of the complex pragmatic processes involved in processing speech acts at the neurocognitive level. Next, the model is discussed in terms of recent advances regarding the long-standing debate in neuroscience about (i) when brain indexes of the linguistic-pragmatic information about communicative functions first occur and (ii) their cortical origins in mind and brain. Finally, I conclude with an outlook on what is needed in the future by highlighting the crucial importance of the mutual exchange of neurobiological approaches and linguistic-pragmatic theories to advance our understanding of the neural substrates of pragmatic knowledge regarding communicative functions in mind and brain.

2. Speech act theory: linguistic signs in action

Philosophy of language and linguistic pragmatics have provided extensive theoretical accounts of how linguistic utterances are used as a tool of communication to perform various actions in context ( Alston, 1964 , Austin, 1975 , Ehlich, 2007 , Ehlich, 2010 , Fritz, 2013 , Fritz and Hundsnurscher, 1994 , Grice, 1975 , Horn and Ward, 2008 , Meibauer, 1999 , Searle, 1969 , Van Dijk, 1977 , Wittgenstein, 1953 ). Defining words as tools that have different functions in their use was first advocated by Wittgenstein, who claimed that the “actions in which language is interwoven” are the result of the rules and context in which communication takes place, the so-called language games ( Wittgenstein, 1953 ). This view became central to Austin’s ( Austin, 1975 ) and Searle’s ( Searle, 1969 ) speech act theory, where utterances were defined as linguistic actions (or speech acts) that not only serve to express information but also to perform specific actions through language, such as promises, requests or warnings. Each time a speech act is produced, three different acts are entailed: (1) The locutionary act , which is the propositional content of what has been said (“give me an apple”), (2) the illocutionary act , which are the goals and intentions behind the speaker’s utterance (“requesting an apple”) and (3) the perlocutionary act , the effect a linguistic action can have on the listener (“B gives an apple to A”). Following Austin’s original proposal ( Austin, 1975 ), Searle ( Searle, 1979 ) proposed five big classes of speech acts based on their illocutionary force. Assertives express things or facts in the external world (naming, stating); directives make the X partner (addressee) do something for the speaker (requesting, commanding); expressives describe the inner emotional state of the speaker (thanking, apologising); commissives commit the speaker to doing something in the future (promising, threatening); declaratives change the state of the world (baptise or arrest). Alternative taxonomies of illocutionary acts have been proposed ( Ballmer and Brennstuhl, 2013 , Van der Auwera, 1980 , Zaefferer, 2001 ) and Wittgenstein emphasised the infinite variants of language games ( Wittgenstein, 1953 ) stressing the difficulties of constructing an exhaustive catalogue of speech acts. Nevertheless, Searle’s taxonomy is a good starting point and is widely used for empirical research.

Since these philosophical and linguistic considerations described above, extensive work has been done on defining the essential features of the pragmatic functions of speech acts, dialogue structures, and other features of communication that are generally distinguishable at the level of linguistic signs, the actual actions that follow it and commitment structure ( Alston, 1964 , Clark, 1996 , Ehlich, 2007 , Ehlich, 2010 , Fritz, 2013 , Fritz and Hundsnurscher, 1994 , Grice, 1975 , Horn and Ward, 2008 , Meibauer, 1999 , Van Dijk, 1977 ). The following are essential:

• i. Propositional content : the linguistic structures (words and sentences) with which a speech act is performed, i.e., the propositional content itself;
• ii. Communicative setting : the non-linguistic aspects of the setting in which the utterances are embedded, including the physical environment in which the communication takes place and the objects present;
• iii. Action sequence structure : the partner action responses preceding and following a given speech act, which are typically embedded in communication ( Alston, 1964 , Kasher, 1987 );
• iv. Intentions and assumptions: the specific assumptions and intentions to what the interlocutors commit to during communication (H. P. Grice, 1968 , Hamblin, 1970 , Kasher, 1987 , Lewis, 1979 , Walton and Krabbe, 1995 ), including shared knowledge between communicative partners (common ground, Stalnaker, 2002 ), aspects of which are sometimes called “theory of mind” (ToM);

Several of these linguistic-pragmatic features characterise the various speech act types differently. Consider, for example, the use of the utterance “cookies” (i) in a physical context (ii) to either name or request cookies and where the structure of the action sequence (iii) as well as the interlocutor's intentions and assumptions (iv) would vary according to the communicative function the utterance conveys. In a naming scenario, speaker A assumes that he or she is using the correct label to refer to the object (e.g., cookies and not cake), that the utterance is uttered and pronounced correctly (e.g., /ˈkʊkiz/, IPA transcription), and is thus understandable in all its components. This also includes the speaker's willingness to express it to the partner and the assumption that he or she might be interested in the item being referred to. The possible actions of listener B following the utterance are tied to these assumptions, where the options are either to correct the speaker's utterance (that the speaker meant cookies and not cake), clarify it (e.g., asking back what the speaker is referring to) or confirm (via verbal or non-verbal signal) having seen the object ( Fig. 1 panel top). In a requesting scenario, speaker A’s assumptions include those in the naming scenario and add to them the assumption that the partner is willing and able to comply with the request and ultimately the speaker's desire to obtain the object. The actions following a request parallel those in the naming scenario, where listener B in response can clarify or correct the speaker’s utterance but also perform the requested action or reject or denies it by communicating that he or she is unable (e.g., there are no cookies left) or unwilling to carry it out ( Fig. 1 panel bottom). Other specific pragmatic features for naming and requesting speech acts could be listed, yet the ones described here and shown in Fig. 1 are the most striking and useful to illustrate the main differences between these two speech acts. In short, at the pragmatic level the differences between the functions of naming and requesting rely on the action sequence structure (iii) and the intentions and assumptions (iv). Specifically, that request actions are characterized by additional assumptions and tied to the expectation of the partner's response of manipulating an object as compared to a naming action, which can have different implications for how these speech acts might be represented in the human brain (see next section).

Dialogue structure differences for the speech act of naming (top) and requesting (bottom). Intentions and assumptions closely linked to the speaker’s intention are on the left and the action sequence structure, which describes the typical action of the communicative partner that follow the specific speech act, is on the right. Figure adapted from Egorova et al., 2013 .

3. Action prediction theory of communicative functions

A neuromechanistic model of communicative functions has been proposed, the so-called “Action Prediction Theory of Communicative Functions” (APC, Pulvermüller et al., 2014 ), which extends existing neurobiological models of language processing, which have mainly focused on the cognitive processes of linguistic structure such as phonological, morpho-syntactic and semantic processing ( Damasio et al., 2004 , Kemmerer et al., 2012 , Pulvermüller and Fadiga, 2010 , Tomasello et al., 2017 , Tomasello et al., 2018 ). The APC model draws on the linguistic-pragmatic considerations described above and integrates insights from the neurobiology of language by offering precise predictions about the pragmatic features that distinguish between communicative functions at the neurocognitive level. The fundamental premise is that at the neural level, speech acts involve neural circuits by which speaker's assumptions and intentions along with the typical sequence of actions that follow it are processed. To illustrate how the different speech acts might be represented in the brain according to the model, let's consider the examples of naming and requesting given above.

When naming an object to direct the listeneŕs attention to the external object a core element is the semantic referential link between the word form and the object in the outside world. Thus, when understanding a naming situation, semantics-related regions shown to be involved in lexical-semantic processing, such as the inferior temporal regions or areas in the parietal-occipital lobe ( Binder et al., 2009 , Pulvermüller, 2013 ), are expected to be strongly active and involving only the left hemisphere. In contrast, understanding a verbal request may involve the motor action system, reflecting the expectation of the typical partner’s action of grasping an object and handing it to the speaker. This includes the mirror system and motor regions ( Ortigue et al., 2010 , Pulvermüller and Fadiga, 2010 , Rizzolatti et al., 1996 ), specifically the motor regions that control the hand, as the object requested (“cookies”) is expected to be manipulated with the hand. Note that regions related to semantic processing (i.e., speech content) are also expected to be active in a requesting situation, but to a lesser extent than in a naming situation, as the speaker’s intention is to obtain the object. Additionally, due to differences in commitment structure between requesting and naming, in particular the fact that requesting is characterised by additional assumptions, whereby the speaker assumptions that the partner is willing and able to comply with the request, theory-of-mind (ToM) network - i.e. the right temporal junction or anterior cingulate regions, which have been shown to be involved in mentalising and social inferencing during communication (e.g., Van Overwalle and Baetens, 2009 ) - is also expected to be strongly activated. Overall, the idea is that speech acts are tied to their predictable sequences of actions, which are a crucial part of their meaning and therefore necessary for their understanding. In conversation analysis, these are typically referred to as “adjacency pairs”, where the speech acts and the response are interdependent (e.g., Schegloff, 2007 ). Here, however, the focus is on the entire set of possible action sequences that can follow a speech act and not just the typical one (e.g., question followed by an answer). Therefore, it is assumed that the entire set of expected (predicted) partner actions can be activated at the neural level from which speech acts derive their meaning. To emphasise this point again, the term 'prediction' here refers to the multiple alternative responses or predictable sequence of actions following a speech act (see Fig. 1 ), which may form an essential part of the mental representation in the brain at the cognitive level.

The APC model can also be employed as a test case for linguistic-pragmatic debates in speech act taxonomy ( Searle, 1979 ). For instance, it has been claimed that Searle’s class of directives inappropriately includes questions. While the intention to “request verbal information” seems to function like requests ( Searle, 1975 , Searle and Vanderveken, 1985 ), other linguists have argued that an appropriate response to a question is an assertion, causing the speaker to update his or her information (i.e. common ground, Clark, 1996 ), functioning markedly differently from requesting an object ( Groenendijk and Stokhof, 1997 , Kiefer, 1980 , Portner, 2004 ). The latter argument would define questions as being more like assertives with the key feature of directives being absent in question processing. If questions are directives and function like requests, the APC model would predict engagement of the articulatory-motor regions, reflecting the expectation of the partner’s typical action of uttering words to provide the desired information. However, if questions function as assertives, regions related to semantics should be active. Note that understanding questions, regardless of their similarity to a directive or assertive function, may additionally involve ToM regions, due to its richer commitment structure associated with the speaker's desire to receive the information that the partner might know and is willing to comply with the request, compared to a typical assertive speech act.

Given these considerations, neurocognitive experiments could be used to explore whether general brain signatures are at work for speech acts of the same category, thus (dis)confirming a speech act membership belonging to a category. It is agreed upon that linguistic pragmatic theories and issues should be critically addressed experimentally ( Noveck & Reboul, 2008 ) and in recent decades a new stream of research in the areas of neuropragmatics has targeted how pragmatic processes in communication are instantiated in the mind and brain. Such research has great potential to inform linguistic-pragmatic theories and cognitive models of language processing ( Bambini et al., 2011 , Bara et al., 1997 , Cutica et al., 2006 , Gambi et al., 2015 , Hagoort and Levinson, 2014 , Levinson, 2016 , Sauerland and Schumacher, 2016 , Soroker et al., 2005 ).

4. Brain dynamics of speech act processing

A long-standing debate between linguists and cognitive scientists in experimental pragmatics is how early brain indexes of linguistic-pragmatic information about communicative functions occur. Upon perceiving a word like “cookies” in a request to obtain them, when would the speaker’s communicative intentions be processed? Very quickly, immediately after word onset, or only later, once phonological, semantic and/or morphosyntactic information has been processed?

Intuitively, one would assume that comprehension mechanisms during the perception of an utterance proceed in discrete steps, where phonetic/phonological information has to be processed before accessing higher-level semantic, syntactic and pragmatic information, which may also be retrieved in sequential steps. This view is consistent with most current psycholinguistic models of language comprehension, which advocate the serial processing of different linguistic representations in a cascade fashion. Upon hearing a linguistic utterance, the cascade comprehension timeline would start with processing phonological information followed by lexico-syntactic access and several stages of lexical and semantic analysis, and only at the end would pragmatic comprehension (i.e., interpretation) come into play ( Fig. 2 , boxes on left). Crucially, the delays between the different representations are in the range of 100 ms, suggesting that interpretation of the literal semantic meaning of an utterance does not occur until 400 ms after onset and that the processing of pragmatic information will not occur before 1000 ms ( Friederici, 2002 , Friederici, 2011 ). Other cascade models ( Pickering and Garrod, 2004 , Pickering and Garrod, 2013 ) advocate more flexible processing of the different linguistic levels, but the processing of pragmatic information (i.e., interpretation/situational model) at the final stage is common to these cascade models. In contrast, the so-called instant/parallel models advocate early and parallel processing of the different linguistic representations, where access to all representations occurs in parallel or nearly simultaneously (within 200 ms) during the perception and recognition processes ( Fig. 2 , boxes on right, Marslen-Wilson, 1987 , Marslen-Wilson and Tyler, 1975 , Pulvermüller et al., 2009 , Shtyrov, 2010 , Strijkers et al., 2017 ). The key research questions, therefore, are: Do pragmatic processes in speech act types occur early or late and do they occur in parallel with other linguistic information or in discrete steps?

Schematic representation of cascade/serial models and instant/parallel models of language processing. The red highlighted box indicates where the two models would assume linguistic-pragmatic processing of speech acts during language understanding. Adapted from Pulvermüller et al., (2009) .

To address these critical questions, a series of studies employing electroencephalography (EEG) investigated in the millisecond range when pragmatic information of speech acts is accessed during the understanding processes in written, spoken, prosodic and gestural contexts. Specifically, cases were examined where the propositional content (i) and the physical environment (ii) were identical but varied in terms of pragmatic differences in speakeŕs intentions (iii) ( Boux et al., 2021 , Coulson and Lovett, 2010 , Egorova et al., 2013 , Egorova et al., 2014 , Gisladottir et al., 2015 , Gisladottir et al., 2018 , Tomasello et al., 2019 , 2022 , see the section “ Speech act theory: linguistic sign in context ”). Earlier studies used experimental set-ups, in which the same linguistic form, “flower”, was used to perform a naming (assertive) or requesting (directive) function in response to the context sentences “what are these called?” and “what can I get you?”, respectively ( Egorova et al., 2013 , Egorova et al., 2014 ). Surprisingly, when participants watched video tapes of two people interacting, therefore, taking an observer perspective, very fast neurophysiological responses were found at 150 ms after the critical word onset, with stronger activation for requesting than for naming ( Egorova et al., 2013 , Fig. 3 A). A follow-up study recording brain responses with magnetoencephalography (MEG) showed differences between the two speech acts even earlier, at 50–90 ms ( Egorova et al., 2014 ). Although these studies demonstrate very early pragmatic processing, the predictive information provided by the context sentence prior to the critical word is somewhat problematic, as it may have triggered responses earlier than more natural, unpredictable communicative scenarios would.

Brain temporal dynamics of different speech act types. A. ERP responses to request and naming scenarios expressed with single words from Egorova et al., 2013 . B. Main ERP responses during request and naming understanding scenarios in a gestural context from Tomasello et al., 2019 . C. Predictive brain activity prior to speaking in naming and request communicative scenario from Boux et al., 2021 . D. Results of the brain responses of question and statement function conveyed by speech prosody, along with brain responses of low-pass filtered critical sentences from Tomasello et al., 2022 . E. ERPs of the target utterance acting as a response to a question, a pre-offer to a statement or a declination of an offer from Gisladottir et al., 2015 . The highlighted windows in magenta show where significant early neurophysiological differences of speech acts were detected.

The rapid pragmatic processing was confirmed in a recent EEG study also examining naming and request functions in an experimental design, in which speech act type and referential information were presented simultaneously (i.e. without prior information about the upcoming speech act). Moreover, the speech acts were addressed directly at the participants, so that the subjects took on the role of the partner ( Tomasello et al., 2019 ). In particular, the same words were presented together with a pointing and give-me gestures having the function of naming or requesting objects (see e.g., Bates, 2014 , Kelly, 2006 ). Interestingly, early and distinct brain responses were detected about 150 ms after their onset. In contrast, brain dynamics became evident much later when only information about speech act type (gestures presented alone) was available, that is, without referential semantic information ( Tomasello et al., 2019 , Fig. 3 B). These results support the notion of early processing of pragmatic information, but add that this only occurs when semantic information (speech content) is available, providing evidence for early and parallel processing of different linguistic information ( Marslen-Wilson, 1987 , Marslen-Wilson and Tyler, 1975 , Pulvermüller et al., 2009 , Shtyrov, 2010 , Strijkers et al., 2017 ).

Brain indexes of speech act types have been shown to also appear before speaking during real-life interaction with an interlocutor ( Boux et al., 2021 ). When naming or requesting an object from a partner, an ERP component resembling the readiness potential was shown to be sensitive to linguistic-pragmatic information prior to speech onset, and thus named “pragmatic prediction potential (PPP)” (for works in the semantic domain see e.g., Grisoni et al., 2021 ). Specifically, a negative-progressive response 600 ms before speaking was found to be more responsive for requesting than naming functions ( Fig. 3 C). These results show that similar neural responses documented in speech act understanding are also involved prior to production. However, determining how early pragmatic processing occurs in production calls for additional research, as the slowly rising prediction potential and the lack of other variables (e.g., semantic) make it impossible to determine the temporal aspects of pragmatic processes.

Turning to other types of linguistic actions in other modalities, Tomasello et al. (2022) explored the brain correlates of question and statement functions conveyed by speech prosody and expressed with the same spoken sentence. In this study, Italian language sentences were used with different pitch contours (or fundamental frequency, F0), which are usually the only cues signalling either a statement (falling pitch) or a question (rising pitch) (e.g., Bolinger, 1978 , Ohala, 1994 ). In line with previous studies, the results showed surprisingly instantaneous neurophysiological differences at 100 ms after the critical word differing in prosody. Whereas, in cases where there was no speech content and only the pitch contour was perceived (low-pass filtered sentences), in which subjects were still able to distinguish between speech act types, no comparable neurophysiological response differences were observed ( Tomasello et al., 2022 , Fig. 3 D). Consistent with a previous study ( Tomasello et al., 2019 ), the findings indicate that the human brain is able to rapidly grasp the speaker’s intentions only when semantic information is available and perceived and demonstrate that this is also the case when prosody alone defines speech act types.

While all these findings show that speech act recognition is instantaneous, another study revealed differences in brain dynamics resulting from differences in dialogue structure ( Gisladottir et al., 2015 ). This study examined mini-dialogues in which the same target-response utterance was preceded by context-specific sentences defining the speech act type. For instance, the sentence “I have a credit card” functioned as: an answer to the question “How are you going to pay for the ticket?”, a declination in response to the offer “I can lend you money for the ticket”, and a pre-offer in response to a statement “I don’t have any money to pay for the ticket”. Although early brain responses occurred at 200 ms for declination versus question responses, later neurophysiological differences were evident at 400 ms for pre-offer versus question responses ( Gisladottir et al., 2015 , Fig. 3 E). A follow-up study in which the same data were subjected to time–frequency analyses reported lower beta activity (12–20 Hz) for declination even before the target sentence, but no anticipatory activity was observed for pre-offer ( Gisladottir et al., 2018 ). Differences in dialogue structure best explain these later-occurring neurophysiological differences. A statement like “I don’t have money to pay for the ticket” is usually not followed by any conventional partner action, in contrast to the question function, where a verbal response is expected. This makes a pre-offer unpredictable from the speaker’s utterance itself, but only when the target utterance is put into action, as the authors argued ( Gisladottir et al., 2015 ). However, in the case of the pre-offer, much more is going on, since it involves a speech act change, from stating (assertive speech act type) to pre-offer (commissive type), where the speech act has to be inferred and reprocessed, causing additional pragmatic processing that may have led to the observed late neural processes. If the response to the statement “I don't have money to pay for the ticket” had only been an “okay”, confirming that the information had been received (i.e., the typical action sequence expected from a statement), faster processing may have been observed. However, this would make comparison with the other conditions difficult, as the target response would not be the same. Overall, it seems that speech acts are processed quickly, but when the action following it cannot be predicted and/or a speech act change occurs in conversation, later temporal activation can be observed. In another study examining non-conventional indirect requests, such as asking for a warmer soup via the utterance “this soup is cold” (which behaves similarly to the pre-offer condition above) compared to the same utterance functioning as a literal statement, early and late processing was observed in the second and fifth words, respectively ( Coulson & Lovett, 2010 ). This evidence confirms that the processing of linguistic-pragmatic information begins early but can continue later during sentence processing. However, further work should look more closely to unravel the specific cognitive function of these early and late pragmatic processes and their underlying brain correlates.

In sum, EEG studies consistently show that brain correlates of speech act types occur rapidly in different modalities and experimental designs. Interestingly, however, quick pragmatic processing only occurs when pragmatic and semantic information is available during communication. These findings thus support neurocognitive parallel models ( Fig. 2 , right panel) that argue for early and parallel processing of different linguistic information, including pragmatic information. The rapid processing of linguistic actions is considered the key for the rapid exchange of turns between speakers and their partners, a well-known hallmark of efficient social-communicative interactions ( Levinson, 2016 ).

5. Brain signatures underlying speech act types

Alongside discoveries about the rapid temporal dynamics of pragmatic processing, brain signatures for specific pragmatic features distinguishing various speech acts have been discovered by means of EEG/MEG source analyses ( Boux et al., 2021 , Egorova et al., 2014 , Tomasello et al., 2019 , Tomasello et al., 2022 ) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI, Bašnáková et al., 2015 , Bašnáková et al., 2014 , Egorova et al., 2016 , Hellbernd and Sammler, 2018 , Licea-Haquet et al., 2021 , Van Ackeren et al., 2016 , Van Ackeren et al., 2012 , Fig. 4 ). A consistent finding is the immediate (∼150 ms) involvement of the hand motor cortex in understanding requests compared to naming functions ( Egorova et al., 2013 , Egorova et al., 2014 , Tomasello et al., 2019 ), which is also supported by spatially accurate neuroimaging results (fMRI, Egorova et al., 2016 ), as well as in speech act production in interaction with a partner ( Boux et al., 2021 ). The activation of the motor area for requests is in line with the predictions provided by the APC model (see section “ Action prediction model of communicative function ”). Requesting is intrinsically linked to the typical follow-up partner action of grasping an object and handing it to the speaker, which has been consistently documented to be reflected in the motor cortex activation during comprehension. In contrast, naming an object is not followed by any such action, rather, the focus is on the semantic referential information of the object in the outside world. Thus, in line with the APC model, the left angular gyrus in the parietal cortex, an area known to be active for referential semantic processing, was more strongly involved in naming than in requesting scenarios ( Egorova et al., 2014 , Egorova et al., 2016 ).

Brain regions in studies investigating different speech act types . Only activation of the left hemisphere is shown along with the pragmatic features relevant for action sequence and social and emotional aspects. Apart from the naming function, similar activations were also found in the right hemisphere. The data shown are from Boux et al., 2021 , Egorova et al., 2014 , Egorova et al., 2016 , Hellbernd and Sammler, 2018 , Tomasello et al., 2019 , Tomasello et al., 2022 , Van Ackeren et al., 2012 , 2016 . Motor regions; temporal parietal junction (TPJ); angular gyrus (AG); amygdala.

When it comes to understanding requests, not only is the follow-up partner action reflected in the mind and brain, but so its richer commitment structure, that entails additional assumptions as compared to naming, specifically the speaker's intention to obtain the desired object and the assumption that the partner can potentially fulfil the request and is willing to do so. In contrast, naming only commits the speaker to the correct referential labelling of the object in order to direct the partner’s attention to it ( Fig. 1 ). The richer social-interactional knowledge inherent to requesting involved the bilateral temporal junction regions that belong to the core ToM network ( Egorova et al., 2014 ), areas deemed crucial in processing the mental state of others, such as intentions, desires and beliefs (e.g., Van Overwalle & Baetens, 2009 ). However, MEG source analysis shows this activation at 200–300 ms, which is much later than the activation of motor areas at 50–90 ms after word onset ( Egorova et al., 2014 ). This suggests that intentions and the action structure sequence are processed first, and other aspects of ToM may emerge later.

The ToM network seems to be strongly activated when understanding indirect requests relative to statements ( Van Ackeren et al., 2012 ). Hearing the sentence “It is hot here” while being presented to a visual scene containing a closed window could be understood as an indirect request to open the window, whereas if a picture of the desert is presented, it expresses a statement. In line with previous studies described above ( Boux et al., 2021 , Egorova et al., 2014 , Egorova et al., 2016 , Tomasello et al., 2019 ), the results show that indirect requests involved both the action-motor regions related to its richer action knowledge, and the temporal junction and middle prefrontal regions, the cortical substrates of ToM. Intriguingly, functional interaction between these areas showed that motor region activation was driven by ToM regions and not by the core language areas (i.e., inferior frontal areas, Van Ackeren et al., 2016 ). The mentalising network activation (ToM area) has been interpreted as crucial for inferring pragmatic meaning, although whether it is related to indirectness or is part of the brain substrate for requesting, or a mix of both, is still an open matter. However, ToM regions, along with emotion areas, have been shown to be consistently being activated in processing indirect speech acts (e.g., direct vs indirect replies, Bašnáková et al., 2015 , Bašnáková et al., 2014 , Bendtz et al., 2022 ), yet different cognitive features of indirect speech acts compared to direct ones have been identified, making it difficult to relate the reported activations to a particular feature of indirectness ( Boux et al., 2022 ).

Examination of brain substrates, in which speech prosodic cues conveying question and statement functions with rising and falling pitch, repsectively, showed instantaneous activation of the left articulatory motor regions (areas controlling lip/tongue movements) for questions 100 ms after the critical words differing in intonation ( Tomasello et al., 2022 ). Note that in this study, the subjects' task was only to listen to the different sentences, and they were not instructed to perform any motor responses, so that the motor activation cannot be attributed to actual motor movements. Once again, the APC model comes into play as the best explanation for the specific motor locus revealed during question understanding in terms of the action sequence structure. A question is inextricably linked to the partner’s action of articulating words to provide the desired information, which is immediately reflected in the articulatory motor activity. These findings further illustrate that the action sequence typically following a speech act is part of its mental representation and relevant for its understanding. Furthermore, the results relate to the theoretical linguistic debate on the core features of questions and their appropriate classification into speech act categories by emphasising the predominance of an action (directive) component in question processing (for more detail see “ Brain data and theoretical implications – the case of question type ”). The presence of motor involvement for question functions was also found in a previous study that documented a ventral and dorsal auditory-motor pathway in the right hemisphere during single word processing ( Sammler et al., 2015 ). Note that although these two studies reveal similarities in question processing, different hemispheric motor involvement was detected. One possible explanation is that Sammler et al., (2015) used single words and showed activation in the right hemisphere, Tomasello et al., (2022) employed spoken sentences, leading to a left hemisphere activation, defined as the core hemisphere for syntax processing ( Friederici et al., 2000 ).

Other neuroimaging studies have shown involvement of the core ToM network as well as affect/emotion regions when understanding clear communicative functions (criticism, doubt and suggestions) conveyed by speech prosody relative to ambiguous ones ( Hellbernd and Sammler, 2018 , see Fig. 4 ), or in a speech act recognition performance contrasted to control conditions ( Licea-Haquet et al., 2021 ). However, these studies used an active task (classification or recognition) involving two forced-choice tasks requiring a button press during the experiment. Active tasks are known to be associated with higher cognitive functions such as identification, attention, decision making and motor preparation, which may have covered relevant pragmatic fine-grained differences between the speech acts examined (e.g. see Schomers and Pulvermüller, 2016 ). Thus, a passive task would have provided more detailed insights into the neural substrates of the different speech acts investigated, possibly showing activation of motor regions for specific action-related speech acts, as consistently reported in other studies ( Boux et al., 2021 , Egorova et al., 2014 , Egorova et al., 2016 , Tomasello et al., 2019 , Tomasello et al., 2022 , Van Ackeren et al., 2012 , Van Ackeren et al., 2016 ).

In sum, specific pragmatic features distinguishing between various speech act types are reflected differently in the human brain. In terms of the APC model, a consistent finding lies in the immediate activation of the motor cortex for action-related speech acts, which reflects the expectation that the partner will do something for the speaker ( Boux et al., 2021 , Egorova et al., 2016 , Tomasello et al., 2019 , Tomasello et al., 2022 ). The ToM network seems to be engaged for speech acts that are more socially complex (i.e., richer commitment structure) and enhanced in cases where linguistic actions are expressed indirectly. Here I also note that studies that use an active task are somewhat problematic due to the additional cognitive load associated with performing such a task. The findings reviewed here show that understanding speech acts crucially entails the knowledge of the typical partneŕs actions that follow them and that are part of their mental representation.

6. Brain data and theoretical implications – The case of question type

A theoretical linguistic debate addresses the core features of questions and their most appropriate classification into speech act groups. A study exploring the brain signatures of questions ( Tomasello et al., 2022 ) has offered critical insights into this theoretical debate, in particular by showing how neurocognitive experiments and thus brain data can be useful in informing linguistic theories and issues.

Standard speech act theory defines questions as the intention to “request verbal information”, so questions are grouped with object-related requests into the category of directives ( Searle, 1975 , Searle and Vanderveken, 1985 ). Yet other linguists argue that questions should be distinguished from directive speech act types ( Groenendijk and Stokhof, 1997 , Kiefer, 1980 , Portner, 2004 ), as an appropriate response to a question is an assertation, which is markedly different from requesting an object at various levels (e.g., updating of shared knowledge between interlocutors). This view would place questions halfway between directives and assertions and would be consistent with the notion that directives are not present in the processing of questions. If motor cortex activation is considered to reflect the action sequence following a request function ( Boux et al., 2021 , Egorova et al., 2016 , Tomasello et al., 2019 , Tomasello et al., 2022 ) and a brain signature of directive speech act types, it is reasonable to ask whether this type of activation is also present in other types of directives and thus in question types.

Looking into the brain during question understanding has indeed revealed immediate activation of the motor regions, specifically the articulatory motor region, reflecting the typical action following a question (i.e., a verbal response, Tomasello et al., 2022 , in red Fig. 5 ). This differs from requesting an object, where the follow-up action is performed with the hand and thus the hand motor cortex was demonstrably activated ( Egorova et al., 2016 , Tomasello et al., 2019 , Van Ackeren et al., 2016 , in green Fig. 5 ). These results indicate physiological similarities between questions and other forms of directives (requests to hand over objects) related to fast motor cortex activation and speaks for including questions in the category of directives, favouring Searle’s perspective. Moreover, the fine-grained motor cortex activation linked to the expected body part action movement (hand vs face representation), further supports the assumption that predictive knowledge are a crucially part of speech acts mental representation. Note that future studies need to replicate this evidence by exploring questions and requests in the same experiment, participants, and modalities. However, I’ve provided a clear example of how brain data can inform linguistic-pragmatic theories and issues, in this case speech act classification, by showing general brain signatures or physiological similarities that are indicative of similarities at the cognitive linguistic-pragmatic level.

Brain activation of request and question function within the motor cortex. Requests: dorsal motor activation (in green; from Tomasello et al., 2019 ) in areas controlling hand motor activity. Questions: inferior motor activation (in red; from Tomasello et al., 2022 ) in the region involved in articulatory movement for spoken language.

7. Concluding remarks, future trends, and directions

Theoretical frameworks of linguistic pragmatics seek to describe and explain how language is used as a tool for communicating in context. Although such pragmatic frameworks have led to important theoretical considerations based on behavioural observations of language use and its consequences in conversations, they offer only indirect insights into the neural mechanisms at work in the human brain. Here I showed that neurocognitive studies allow direct observation of the spatio-temporal cognitive mechanisms of pragmatic processing of speech acts and can yield crucial insights into the complex system of language architecture and its function in social interaction. The crucial contribution of neurophysiological methods (EEG/MEG) has made it possible to study the brain dynamics underlying pragmatic information millisecond by millisecond, providing converging evidence for the ultra-rapid processing of pragmatic information occurring in parallel with other linguistic information (i.e., semantic), thus supporting parallel models of language processing (right-hand side, Fig. 2 ).

Source analysis (EEG/MEG) and brain imaging studies (fMRI) enabled the exploration of the cortical brain regions underlying speech act processing, which led to an interesting side effect: the discovery of specific brain signatures indicative of the processing of specific pragmatic features related to different speech act types. Consistent evidence includes the immediate activation (∼150 ms) of cortical motor regions related to the partner’s expected action following directive speech act type. For example, the hand motor cortex was found to be consistently activated during basic object-related verbal requests representing the partner's expectation of object manipulation ( Boux et al., 2021 , Egorova et al., 2016 , Tomasello et al., 2019 , Van Ackeren et al., 2016 ), and the articulatory-motor region is likewise activated for question function, mirroring the preparation of a vocal response ( Tomasello et al., 2022 ). Overall, these results provide initial evidence that there are specific brain signatures indicating that the expectation of partner action following a speech act is part of the mental representation.

Although neuroscientific methods allow for the exploration of neural mechanisms underlying pragmatic processing and social interaction, linguistic-pragmatic theories are equally useful and crucial in informing neurocognitive experimental studies and their set-ups to investigate the specificities of different speech act types. Based on this foundation, a neuromechanistic, action prediction model of communicative functions has been proposed that can provide a range of possible predictions about the brain correlates of different speech acts. Such predictions can be validated by looking at the brain and, in turn, findings deriving from empirical neuro-cognitive approaches can inform unresolved debates in linguistic theory in a mutually fruitful exchange.

An important conclusive note is that research into language use and communicative functions and their neural correlate in the human brain is still in its infancy. Although these initial results support the proposed APC model, further studies of speech act processing in different modalities and experimental settings are needed to further test the validity of the model. Further studies could, for example, investigate whether patients with lesions in the motor cortex are impaired in understanding action-related speech acts such as requests and questions. This would support the thesis that the predictive action sequence that follows a speech act is functionally relevant for its understanding. Besides, only a few speech acts (mostly in the directive and assertive category) have been researched from the perspective of neuroscience, less attention has been given, for instance, to expressive or commissive acts. Moreover, because communication requires two or more interacting persons ( Holler and Levinson, 2019 , Levinson, 1983 ), which has been defined as joint actions ( Clark, 1996 ), there is the need to replicate and confirm the findings described in neurocognitive studies in ways that more closely resemble real-life interactions. Since laboratory experiments are often far from reality, in which experimental variables known to influence natural conversation have not yet been sufficiently explored (e.g., common ground, joint attention, eye gaze etc.). Recent research has attempted to achieve such an approximation, for example by including a “confederate” who enacts dialogue participation (see e.g., Bögels et al., 2015 , Boux et al., 2021 , Rueschemeyer et al., 2015 ) or the use of dual recordings or so-called hyper-scanning methods, where two interlocutors (a speaker and a listener) are simultaneously scanned during social interaction (see for a review Czeszumski et al., 2020 , Kuhlen et al., 2015 ). New insights in speech act understanding and production during interaction can be tackled by using such methods, specifically answering also critical questions about neural synchronisation. Recently, novel, sophisticated computational methods have also been proposed to align data points with stimulus presentation when studying continuous natural speech in context ( Schilling et al., 2021 ); such a method could be adopted for the study of pragmatic processing of speech and interaction or even be combined with the more real-life experimental settings mentioned above.

Although much work is still needed to further advance our understanding of the complex system of language architecture and its function in social interactions, all the research discussed here shows promising ways to investigate the brain mechanisms involved in communication. It further shows that linguistic-pragmatic theories are powerful tools for guiding neurocognitive pragmatic models (i.e., APC) and experimental research, and that their findings can, in turn, refine theories and ultimately lead to a better understanding of how communicative functions are processed at the level of linguistic actions, mental processes and neural circuits.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The author declare that he has no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) through the priority program Xprag.de (SPP 1727, project ‘Brain Signatures of Communication (BraiSiCo), Pu 97/23-1), by the support of the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity. Image Space Material« funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under Germany's Excellence Strategy (EXC 2025 – 390648296), and the European Research Council, Advanced Grant “Material Constraints Enabling Human Cognition” (ERC-2019-ADG 883811).