Theoretical foundations of the study. What is a speech act
17. Fundamentals of the theory of speech acts. The concept of a speech act, types of speech acts. Conditions for the success of speech acts.
Trif:
speech act
The theory of speech acts arose in line with analytical philosophy. A characteristic feature of this trend was an interest in language, an attempt to answer questions about what language is, what is its connection with the objects of the world, what is the meaning of the word. M. Frege, B. Russell, early L. Wittgenstein believed that there are a number of words, the so-called "simple symbols", the meaning of which is reduced to a reference - an indication of an object. Sentences that include these words may be true or false, depending on their correspondence or inconsistency with the facts of reality.
J. Austin challenged the thesis that a sentence can only "describe" the state of things or "state something about some fact" and be either true or false. He showed that the phrases we use often have a completely different purpose: we can give orders, apologize, make promises, make assumptions, warn someone, blame, greet - in a word, use language to perform various actions. Such statements-actions (for example, "You are fired", "The meeting is postponed", "I will bequeath my watch to my elder brother") J. Austin called performatives. Their distinguishing feature is that they can neither be true nor false; moreover, such statements do not describe our actions and do not claim that we are doing something; by the very act of saying them, we produce actions. For example, to thank someone means to say words of gratitude, to open a meeting means to say: "I declare the meeting open", to warn of danger - to say or write something like: "Beware of high voltage!"
Illocutionary act: intentional and conventional aspects
For J. Searle, the successor of Austin's ideas, the theory of speech acts was primarily a theory of meaning. Searle focused on one of the three levels of the speech act - the "illocutionary act". An illocutionary act is an action that we perform by uttering some phrase (we can convince someone, ask, accuse, instruct), it should be distinguished from the locutionary act - by itself uttering some sounds or writing some icons on paper - and perlocutionary act - the impact of our statement on the actions, thoughts or emotions of the listeners (our statement can convince / not convince the interlocutor, make him do something or cause him irritation or boredom, etc.). Searle believed that the main purpose of the language is not in the description of the objects of reality, but in the implementation of purposeful actions; therefore, in search of an answer to the question: "What is meaning?", he moved from the level of a single word to the level of a unit of communication, with the help of which a separate action is carried out, that is, to the level of an illocutionary act. This was an important step in the functional approach to the analysis of linguistic phenomena and made it possible to consider statements not in terms of truth/falsehood, but in terms of intentions and conventions.
If the illocutionary act is an intentional act, then in order to understand the corresponding utterance it is necessary to invoke the notion of the speaker's intention. Then the question of meaning can be reformulated as follows: "What did the speaker mean by using this statement?" Searle’s answer to this question is the interpretation of the concept of “meaning” borrowed from P. Grice: to say that A meant something by x (A meant something by x) means to say that “using the expression x, A intended have a certain effect on the listeners, who recognize this intention.
To perform an intentional action by uttering certain sounds, the intention to perform this action alone is not enough. Searle adds to the intentional aspect of meaning also a conventional aspect: it is necessary to use precisely those words and expressions that are usually used to carry out such influences. "Say 'It's cold here', meaning 'It's warm here'," L. Wittgenstein puzzles the reader in his Philosophical Sayings. The reason why this cannot be done is that in the case of inadequate and non-conventional use of language, the speaker's intention has no chance of being recognized by the hearer.
Thus, the possibility of carrying out actions with the help of words is not only a matter of intentions, but also of conventions. The meaning of the uttered utterance and the nature of the action performed by means of it is determined, firstly, by the intention with which the speaker uses this utterance, and, secondly, by what are the conventions of using language for the implementation of this particular type of intention.
Meaning and context
The conventional aspect of the illocutionary act has another dimension. The meaning of an utterance is a function of many "conventional variables", which include not only the linguistic means used to construct it, but also the context in which it is used. Only in the appropriate situation, under the appropriate conditions, the phrases we utter can be perceived in the sense that we mean, and be effective for the performance of the actions we have conceived. For example, in order for the phrase "I declare you husband and wife" to be valid, it must at least be uttered in a marriage situation; we will not carry out any order with the words "Prepare your report for tomorrow" if we address them to our boss; it is pointless to ask the conductor to check the tickets if it is obvious that he will do it anyway. In other words, in order for a sequence of sounds to be perceived by others as a warning, a promise, advice, a request, it is necessary that certain usage conventions or rules exist in this society. Searle calls them "constitutive rules" and attaches such importance to them that he defines illocutionary acts as acts carried out in accordance with constitutive rules. He believes that for each of the varieties of speech acts: promises, advice, orders - a list of such rules can be compiled. In the event that all the rules from this list are fulfilled for some specific word usage, we have good reasons for classifying the statement as an illocutionary act of this particular type. So, for example, for the illocutionary act of request, the following rules can be listed:
1. Rule of propositional content
The content of the utterance P must refer to the action X to be performed by the hearer.
2. Preparatory rules:
(a) the hearer is able to perform action X and the speaker is convinced of this;
(b) it is obvious to both participants in the interaction that the listener would not have performed action X if he had not been asked to do so.
3. Rule of sincerity
The speaker wants action X to be performed by the listener.
4. Essential rule
The utterance of the statement P is an attempt to induce the hearer to do the action X.
At first glance, this list is a fairly complete representation of the conditions that must be met in order for the utterance of a certain phrase to be an act of request. For example, based on it, you can show that the question "Could you stay a minute?" is actually a request. Indeed, (1) the content of this sentence predicates some act to the listener, and this act does not refer to the past; (2) there is no doubt about the preparatory conditions, that is, the characteristics of the situation in which the implementation of this illocution makes sense; (3) the utterance of said sentence can actually be regarded as a deliberate attempt to induce the hearer to do something.
However, the practice of empirical studies of language shows that Searle's sets of constitutive rules are often insufficient to accurately recognize the type of illocutionary act, they do not contain all the variety of connections between meaning and context. So, on the basis of the above list of rules, it is impossible to explain why the mentioned question "Could you stay a minute?" may not be considered a request, but an order, being used in relation to a subordinate (this example is taken from). In this case, in order to understand the meaning of the statement, it is necessary to involve more extensive information about the context.
Illocutionary purpose as the basis for the classification of speech acts. Indicators of illocutionary purpose
The intentional aspect of the meaning of an utterance used to perform a speech action found expression in the concept of illocutionary purpose proposed by Searle. According to Searle, the main thing that distinguishes one illocutionary act from another is the intention with which the speaker utters the corresponding statement. For example, when making an act of promise, the speaker assumes the obligation to perform some action. This parameter was put by Searle in the basis of his proposed classification of illocutionary acts. An illocutionary goal is a setting for a specific response of the addressee, which is communicated to him in the utterance.
Searle showed that illocutionary acts with the same content can have quite different illocutionary aims. So the pronunciation of the following expressions:
1. Will John leave the room?
2. John, get out of the room!
3. If John leaves the room, I will leave too.
It is in the first case a question, in the second - a request or an order, in the third - a hypothetical expression of intention. This allowed a distinction to be made between the general content of a sentence (also referred to by him as a judgment or proposition) and its illocutionary purpose (function). "About a large class of sentences used to perform illocutionary acts, for the purposes of our analysis, it can be said that the sentence has two (not necessarily separate) parts - an element that serves as an indicator of judgment, and a means that serves as an indicator of function" . This thesis was of great practical importance for the analysis of speech acts.
According to Searle, the indicators of the function, that is, the parameters that allow assessing which illocutionary act is performed when pronouncing a given sentence, can be verb mood, intonational contour, punctuation, and stress. They also include many so-called performative verbs; I can indicate the type of illocutionary action I am performing by beginning a sentence with "I promise", "I warn", "I approve", "I condole".
This series contains, of course, only the most elementary indicators of the function of the illocutionary act. Some of the conclusions made by J. Austin in the work "How to perform actions with the help of words?" allow us to add adverbs and adverbial combinations ("possibly", "certainly"); accompanying facial expressions, gestures, ceremonial non-verbal actions; particles: "therefore" (its use is equivalent to the expression "I conclude that"), "after all" (equal in strength to "I insist"), "although" (in some cases it can be equated to "I admit that" ).
It should be noted that both Austin and Searle recognized that in some cases it is possible to understand the purpose for which a statement is used only on the basis of context. For example, as Austin shows, the words "One day I die" or "I will bequeath my watch to you" are understood by us in different ways depending on the state of health of the speaker.
Types of speech acts
The first classification of speech acts was proposed by the creator of the theory of speech acts, J. Austin. Later, J. Searle proposed his own classification. As a basis for it, he chose the illocutionary goal and the concepts arising from it: the direction of adaptation and the expressed conditions of sincerity.
We list the classes of speech acts identified by Searle. These are, firstly, representative - statements aimed at fixing (to varying degrees) the speaker's responsibility for reporting a certain state of affairs, for the truth of the expressed judgment. This includes a wide range of statements from a hypothetical statement to an oath, containing such dissimilar verbs as "boast", "complain", "deduce", "conclude". Representatives are the only class of statements that fit into the "true-false" opposition. The simplest test for identifying them is trying to literally evaluate the statement (among other things) as true or false.
The next class of speech acts are directives. Their illocutionary orientation consists in the speaker's desire to get the listener to do something. Acts of this class can often be identified by the presence of such verbs as "to ask", "to order", "to command", "to ask", "beg", "conjure", "invite", "advise", etc.
Another class of speech acts is commissives. Searle defines them as illocutionary acts aimed at imposing not on the listener, but on the speaker the obligation to perform some future action or follow a certain line of behavior. This class includes various kinds of promises and oaths. This should not unambiguously include those acts that contain the verbs intend - "intend" and shall - "should (I will)". According to Searle, these verbs are not performative at all. For example, to say "I intend" does not mean "to intend", but only "to express an intention".
The penultimate class in Searle's taxonomy is expressives. Their illocutionary goal is to express a psychological state, given by the condition of sincerity regarding the state of affairs, defined within the propositional content. Typical verbs for expressives: "thank", "congratulate", "sympathize", "apologize", "sorry", "greet". The propositional content of statements of this class must attribute some property (not necessarily an action) to the speaker or listener. For example, you can congratulate a person on winning the races or on the fact that he looks good, you can regret that you will not be able to meet him in an hour, but it would be nonsense to congratulate the interlocutor on the discovery of Newton's first law of motion.
Declarations are such speech acts, the result of which is the implementation of the states of affairs presented in their propositional content. Here "speaking constitutes a fact." There are many examples of declarations: “I excommunicate you”, “I resign”, “I declare martial law”, “You are fired”, “I declare you husband and wife”, etc.
Declarations occupy a special place in the theory of speech acts. It is they who are cited as an example of how social reality is "created" through language: "If I successfully perform the act of appointing you as chairman, you become chairman; if I successfully perform the act of nominating you as a candidate, you become a candidate; if I successfully perform the act of announcing state of war, then war begins; if I successfully perform the act of marriage with you, then you are bound by marriage ".
Let us note that the most characteristic examples of declarations belong to the institutional discourse:
I find you guilty of the charge.
I pronounce you husband and wife.
I excommunicate you from the church.
You are out of the game (used by the referee during the match).
It is easy to see that for the successful implementation of actions through statements of this kind, to a greater extent than for other types of illocutionary, the following extralinguistic contextual conditions are required: (1) both the speaker and the listener must occupy the appropriate social positions; (2) the words must be spoken within a certain institutionally determined situation; (3) the form of phrases should be regulated by the institutional framework. In other words, the effectiveness of declarations and their ability to translate words into reality are firmly rooted in the structure of social institutions. "It is precisely in the presence of such institutions as the church, law, private property, the state, and the specific position of the speaker and listener within their framework that one can, in fact, be excommunicated, appointed to a post, transfer and bequeath property, declare war" .
Indirect speech acts
Sometimes people prefer not to communicate their communication intentions directly, but do so indirectly. In these cases, they carry out one (conceived by them) speech action, using another. For example, by asking a question and thus, as if expecting the listener to provide us with some information, we can actually ask him with a request and thereby induce him to take some action. Typical examples are questions of the form:
(1) Could you please close the window?
(2) May I ask you to pass me the salt?
(3) Can you lend me your notes?
In some cases, its content helps to clarify the real purpose of the statement. For example, in all the examples given, we are talking about some future action, the commission of which is predicated to the listener, which is typical for directives (requests, orders, etc.). However, sometimes the illocutionary purpose of an indirect speech act is less obvious and not directly related to the content of the utterance, as, for example, in indirect directives of the form:
(4) It's getting cold in here (could be interpreted as a request to close the window).
(5) The bar closes in 10 minutes (please hurry up for the last order).
The form of statements used in indirect speech acts may be more or less conventional. So, the use of interrogative sentences like (1) - (3) in indirect directives is generally accepted, therefore it is not difficult to recognize them. The situation is more complicated with examples (4), (5), where in order to determine the true illocutionary purpose, it is necessary to know the context of use, which may include co-text, situation parameters, and a broader socio-cultural context.
A significant help in the interpretation of indirect speech acts are the communicative rules of speech communication, formulated by P. Grice. According to Grice, in their speech behavior, people follow the four universal rules (maxims) of communication, which follow from the "principle of cooperation" that is mandatory for any communicator, these are: (1) the maximum of completeness of information; (2) the maxim of quality ("Tell the truth!"); (3) the maxim of relevance ("Stay on topic!"); (4) maxim of manner ("Speak clearly, concisely and consistently!") . In a number of cases, communicants, from the point of view of explicit meanings, violate these maxims. As a rule, these are precisely the cases when the speaker veils the true purpose of his speech action and is interested in an indirect way of expressing it. So a child pointing at a stuffed rabbit in a toy store with the question "What is it?" violates the maxim of completeness of information, since it is obvious that the answer is well known to him. This question can serve as a signal to the grandmother that the child wants such a toy and asks to buy it.
the end
The phrase "theory of speech acts" is used in a broad and narrow sense. In the first case, it denotes any set of ideas aimed at explaining speech activity, and is synonymous with the "theory of speech activity." In the second case, it acts as the name of one particular theory (the English term is speech act theory, theory of speech acts), which, as the system of publications indicates, has become widespread abroad and attracted the attention of Soviet scientists who develop the problems of speech communication both in theoretical , as well as in the applied aspect.
The core of the theory of speech acts (hereinafter referred to as SPE) is the ideas set forth by the English logician J. Austin in a course of lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955 and published in 1962 under the title "Word as Action" (see pp. 22-129)1 . Subsequently, these ideas were developed by the American logician J. Searle in the monograph Speech Acts2 and in a number of articles. The well-known English logician P. F. Strawson also took part in the discussion of Austin's ideas. The works of Austin, Strawson and Ser-la, included in this collection, fully reflect the range of problems and methods for their solution, which can be called the standard theory of speech acts, in contrast to its various modifications that have appeared recently. It is to this main part of the TRA that we turn.
1 Here and below, references to the pages of this collection are given in parentheses.
2 S eagl e J. R. Speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language. london,
Until recently, J. Austin and P. F. Strawson were known to the Soviet reader only as representatives of "linguistic philosophy". In the works of Marxist philosophers, their scientific heritage was considered mainly from the point of view of criticism of neopositivism as a direction of bourgeois philosophy, reducing philosophy to the activity of analyzing linguistic forms.
1 See, for example: Kozlova M.S. Philosophy and language. M., 1972; Bogomolov A.S. English bourgeois philosophy of the XX century. M., 1973; Brutyan GA Essays on the analysis of philosophical knowledge. Yerevan, 1979; Albrecht E. Criticism of modern linguistic philosophy. M., 1977.
2 Bogomolov A.S. Decree. op., p. 267.
3 Philosophical Encyclopedic Dictionary. M., 1983, p. 314.
4 Bogomolov A.S. Decree. op., p. 267.
5 There are already a number of studies in this area: see Arutyunova N.D. Proposal and its meaning. M., 1976; Zvegintsev V. A. Proposal and its relation to language and speech. M., 1976; Paducheva E.V. Actualization of the sentence as part of a speech act. - "Formal representation of linguistic information". Novosibirsk, 1982; Starikova EN Foreign theories of speech activity. - "Language and ideology", Kyiv, 1981; Barchunova T. V. The communicative function of language and the methodology of modern linguistics. - "Methodological and philosophical problems of linguistics and literary criticism." Novosibirsk, L984; Bezmenova N. A., Gerasimov V. I. Some problems in the theory of speech acts. - "Linguistic activity in the aspect of linguistic pragmatics". M., INION, 1984.
knowledge1. They convincingly prove that, consciously avoiding solving the main questions of philosophy, declaring the classical problems of philosophy as "metaphysics", neopositivism in general and linguistic philosophy in particular did not and could not give a solution to the urgent philosophical and methodological problems of modern science. Indeed, in the context of philosophical and methodological problems, J. Austin's article "Three Ways to Spill Ink", dedicated to distinguishing between the meanings of the words intentionally "intentionally *, deliberately" intentionally "and on purpose" on purpose "does not look serious2. However, one has only to imagine that the author This article is a lexicologist, as the problem solved in it immediately acquires scientific significance.Therefore, when evaluating studies carried out in line with linguistic philosophy, Marxist philosophers draw a clear distinction between their philosophical and worldview content or philosophical implications and their specifically linguistic content.If the former is recognized unconditionally theoretically untenable<и идеологически вредным, то во втором усматриваются положительные моменты, связанные с решением ряда собственно лингвистических проблем. «Лингвистическая философия содержит некоторые позитивные результаты по анализу логической структуры обыденного языка и изучению его семантических возможностей»3. ТРА относится к той части лингвистической философии, которая представляет собой «явный выход в сферу лингвистики как таковой»4. Дать объективную оценку результатов этого выхода, оценить рабочие возможности ТРА в свете проблем теоретической и прикладной лингвистики - одна из актуальных задач советского языкознания5, решение которой существенно облегчает публикация работ по ТРА в данном сборнике.
In the first half of the 20th century, linguistics for a rather long period was focused on the study of one of the two dialectically interconnected aspects of the language - the language system, but, starting from the second half of the 60s, the focus of linguists shifted to the second side of this dialectical unity - speech activity. and its product is a coherent text, a discourse. Much has been written about the regular nature of this reorientation and how it changes the face of modern linguistics, which spares us the need to dwell on it in more detail. We only note that back in the 1920s and 1930s, prominent Soviet scientists E. D. Polivanov, L. V. Shcherba, L. P. Yakubinsky, A. M. Peshkovsky, M. M. Bakhtin used the Marxist concept of activity as an explanatory principle1 in the study of language as a system. However, speech activity itself was not then the subject of serious study by linguists. When they began to pay closer attention to it, it turned out that the prevailing ideas about it are clearly insufficient for analyzing the real processes of speaking and understanding. Naturally, under such conditions, the interest of linguists in any attempt to construct a general or particular theory of speech activity turned out to be natural.
Why is TRA so popular? After all, it is not the first and not the only one among other activity representations of the language. Suffice it to recall the deep linguo-philosophical concept of W. Humboldt and other concepts of the Humboldtian orientation, the theory of language and speech by A. Gardiner, the theory of utterance by M. M. Bakhtin, the theory of speech activity in Soviet psycholinguistics, based on the psychological theory of activity of Vygotsky-Leontiev, theory of argumentation (neorhetoric), the concept of "conversational analysis", which has developed within the framework of sociolinguistics, procedural semantics, which arose in the context of creating systems of human-machine communication.
Among the reasons for the popularity of TPA are both purely external and internal, arising from its content.
1 On the various functions of the concept of activity in the process of cognition, see: Yudin EG The concept of activity as a methodological problem. - "Ergonomics", 1976, No. 10.
Purely external reasons include, for example, the acquaintance of a fairly wide circle of linguists who speak English with J. Austin's course of lectures "Word as Action", published in 1962 as a separate book. (Compare the fate of the book Osti ^
on with the fate of the work of M. M. Bakhtin “The Problem of Speech Genres”, which outlines his theory of utterance. Written in 1953, it was only partially published in a journal in 1978, and only in 1979 saw the light of day in full1.) The simplicity of the language and the liveliness of the style of Austin's lectures contributed in no small measure to the popularity of his ideas.
But it was not external causes that contributed to the spread of TPA. The main reasons are internal: obviously, this theory has caught and revealed some important aspect of speech activity, which in other activity concepts has not received proper coverage. To identify both strengths and weaknesses of TPA, it is necessary to consider its general and specific features.
Let us first dwell on the most general characteristics of TRA, which determine its place in the typology of theories of speech activity. To do this, we will use a set of features proposed by V. I. Postovalova2: 1) the methodological status of the theory; 2) its conceptual premises; 3) the breadth of the assignment of the field of study of the language; 4) accentuation of a certain plan of the object of study; 5) attitude towards the subject of activity; 6) research method.
According to its methodological status, TRA is a highly specialized linguistic theory that does not claim to put forward a general theory about the nature of language, in contrast to the activity concepts of the Humboldtian orientation.
1 Bakhtin M. M. Aesthetics of verbal creativity. M., 1979.
2 Postovalova V. I. Language as an activity. Experience in interpreting the concept of W. Humboldt. M., 1982, p. 199.
Like any other theory of speech activity, TRA has its own conceptual premises. For the creators of this theory, it acted primarily as a development and deepening of ideas about the meaning and meaning of linguistic expressions that have developed in philosophical logic. So, J. Austin, introducing the concept of a performative statement, considers this as another step in the development of ideas about the boundary between meaningful and meaningless statements, and J. Searle, formulating the rules for using the verb promise "promise * as an indicator of the function of the statement, considers this as evidence correctness of the view that knowledge of the meaning of a linguistic expression is knowledge of the rules for its use.This view of the meaning, as well as the idea of the closest connection of language with those non-verbal actions in which it is woven, is evidence of the deep ideological influence that the views of the late Wittgenstein on TRA.1 As for the ties of TRA with the linguistic tradition, here it should be noted, on the one hand, the absence of a direct ideological connection with any linguistic school, and on the other hand, a rather high level of linguistic training of its founders. J. Urmson, Oxford Philosophers " almost without exception one comes to philosophy after a very serious study of classical philology. Characteristic of TRA is the lack of reliance on any psychological, sociological or philosophical theory of activity. Finally, it should be noted that initially speech actions related to the legal sphere, that is, regulated by legal norms, acted as the main object of consideration in the TRA. Therefore, Austin often appeals to the experience of lawyers, and sometimes argues with them. The emphasis on "legal" speech acts undoubtedly affected the understanding of a speech action as an action performed in accordance with certain non-linguistic regulations or conventions.
The object of study in TRA is the act of speech, which consists in pronouncing sentences by the speaker in a situation of direct communication with the listener. Thus, TPA is characterized by the maximum narrowing of the object of study compared to other theories. Indeed, in the concept of “analysis of dialogue” (see above, p. 9), dialogue, that is, the exchange of speech acts, acts as a global object of study. In the Soviet psycholinguistic theory of speech activity, the global object of study is the activity of communication ((communication) within the framework of a holistic act of social interaction. The field of study is set even wider in the concepts of Humboldtian orientation, which study language activity as a whole, that is, “language in extension throughout the entire space of spiritual life human "3. The narrowing of the field of study, on the one hand, limited the possibilities of TRA, but, on the other hand, made it possible to focus attention on a detailed description of the internal structure of the speech act - this elementary even of speech communication. It is no coincidence that the concepts of speech activity, which have a wider range, when discussing the minimum units of speech activity, they borrow many concepts developed in TRA.
1 Wittgenstein L. Philosophical investigations. Oxford, 1963.
2 Quot. according to the book: Benveniste E. General linguistics. M., 1974, p. 301-
3 Psstovalova V.I. Decree. op., p. 201.
When analyzing a speech act, one can, in principle, focus on different plans for its study - static or dynamic.
chesky. In the works of the founders of TRA, a static approach to the speech act prevails, which gives reason to reproach it for ignoring the dynamic nature of communication (see, for example, the opinion of D. Frank on p. 367). However, it also contains elements of a dynamic approach. So, Searle formulates a sequence of rules that the speaker is guided by, choosing the verb promise "promise" to explication the function of his statement (see p. 167), reconstructs the procedures carried out by the hearer when understanding statements, the actual meaning of which does not coincide with their literal sense (see pp. 199, 211. In the course of the development of TPA, the trend towards a dynamic approach intensifies, not least of which was the idea of a procedural, or procedural, approach to language, formulated in research on artificial intelligence1.
In TRA, the subject of speech activity is understood as an abstract individual who is the bearer of a number of characteristics, psychological (intention, knowledge, opinion, emotional state, will) and social (status in relation to the listener, function in the districts of a certain social institution). It is obvious that the social properties of the subject, manifested in his speech behavior, are represented in TRA very poorly compared to a number of other teachings in which the speaking individual acts as the owner of a certain repertoire of roles, as the bearer of certain national and cultural traditions. This is definitely one of her weaknesses.
The main method of studying an object in TRA is the analytical method in its various forms. The difference between TPA and psh-ho- and sociolinguistic theories of speech activity in this aspect is that the former is based on the data of a thought experiment, while the latter use the methods of collecting and processing data developed in sociology and experimental psychology.
Summing up the foregoing, we get a general description of TRA: it is a logical-philosophical in terms of initial interests and linguistic in terms of results, the doctrine of the structure of the elementary unit of speech communication - a speech act, understood as the actualization of a sentence, and speech communication is considered as a form of manifestation of predominantly interpersonal relations.
1 See, for example: Bach K., Harnish R. M. Linguistic communication and speech acts. Cambridge (Mass.), 1982; see also the article by Allen and Perrault in Nast, a collection.
Having characterized TRA from the outside, in terms of its general typological features, let's move on to examining it from the inside.
No theory of communicative activity, regardless of the scale of its object of study, can do without formulating a model of a communicative situation.
TRA offers its original model of the communicative situation. Along with such components as the speaker, listener, utterance, circumstances, without which no communication model can do (in other models, these components may be called differently), the speech act model in TRA also includes the goal and result of the speech act. Let us recall that the Prague functionalism, which put forward the requirement “to analyze all the properties of the language associated with the fact that the language is a tool, from the point of view of the tasks for which these properties are intended”1 (my discharge. - Ya./S.), and called his model of the “target” language, due to the specific interpretation of the concept of purposefulness (identifying it with functionality), did not reveal the determining role of the goal factor in speech activity2. It is no coincidence that in the well-known model of the communicative act by R. O. Yakobson, the “goal” component is absent3.
The approach to a speech act as a way for a person to achieve a certain goal and consideration of the linguistic means used by him from this angle is the main feature of TRA, which attracted linguists to it, who were no longer satisfied with the simple statement that language is a means, a tool, an instrument of communication. The interests of developing their own science and the tasks set before it by practice forced linguists to look for an answer to the question of what is the mechanism for using language to achieve the diverse goals that arise in the course of social interaction between people.
1 Jacobson R. Development of a target language model in European linguistics in the period between the two wars. - "New in linguistics", vol. IV. M., 1964, p. 374.
2 See: Zvegintsev V. A. Function and purpose in linguistic theory. - "Problems of theoretical and experimental linguistics". M., Publishing House of Moscow State University, 1977.
3 Jacobson R. Linguistics and poetics. - "Structuralism: "for" and "against". M., 1975.
4 Wed. with the Soviet psycholinguistic theory of speech activity, where three levels of its consideration are also distinguished - activity, action and operation. See Fundamentals of the Theory of Speech Activity. M., 1974.
A single speech act is presented in TRA as a three-level entity4. The speech act in relation to the linguistic means used in its course acts as a locative act. The speech act in its relation to the manifested goal and a number of conditions for its implementation acts as an illocutionary act. Finally, in
Carrying to its results, the speech act acts as a perlocutionary act. (See Austin's work in this collection.)
This triple opposition finds its correspondence in the idea of the heterogeneity of the plan of the content of the utterance. Using linguistic means in the course of a locutionary act, the speaker endows his statement with a locutionary meaning. By manifesting the purpose of speaking under certain conditions in the course of an illocutionary act, the speaker imparts a certain illocutionary force to the utterance. As for the perlocutionary act, by its very essence it is not in a necessary connection with the content of the utterance (see p. 93). Thus, there are two pairs of interrelated categories of speech act analysis and utterance semantics: locutionary act - locutionary meaning and illocutionary act - illocutionary force, generalized in terms of locution and illocution.
The main innovation of the three-level scheme of speech action proposed by Austin is undoubtedly the concept of illocution. Locution has been the object of study of all semantic theories in linguistics, which modeled the correspondence between an isolated sentence and its meaning, or rather, a pseudo-sense - a theoretical construct abstracted from a number of aspects of the content transmitted by the sentence when it is used in communication1. Perlocution - the effect of speech on the thoughts and feelings of the audience and through this effect on the deeds and actions of people - this is the aspect of the speech act that rhetoric has long been concerned with. Only the concept of illocution captures such aspects of the act of speech and the content of the utterance that are not captured by either formal semantics or rhetoric in its traditional sense. Naturally, the main attention is paid to the clarification of the concept of illocution in TRA.
1 See: V. A. Zvegintsev, Proposal and its relation..., p. 188-200. What has been said about locution does not apply to the reference that Austin included in the concept of locution. Reference, that is, correlation with the external world, has in the general case only a sentence used in speech, or an utterance; and in relation to an isolated sentence, one can only speak of the referential purpose of the linguistic expressions contained in it (see Paducheva E.V. Statement and its correlation with reality. M., Nauka, 1985, pp. 38-40, 83).
Austin does not give a precise definition of the concept of an illocutionary act. Introducing this concept for the first time (see p. 86), he only gives examples of illocutionary acts - a question, an answer, an information, an assurance, a warning, an appointment, a criticism, etc. Austin then tries to discover the distinguishing features of an illocution. His lengthy and interesting discussions on this subject are reduced by Strawson to four main propositions (see pp. 131-132), of which the most important are the first and fourth. According to the first proposition, the main feature by which an illocutionary act differs from a locutionary one is the feature of purposefulness. According to the fourth proposition, the main feature by which the illocutionary act is opposed to the perlocutionary act is the feature of conventionality.
These two provisions reflect, albeit in an insufficiently clear form, the contradiction inherent in the statement between two moments inextricably linked in it - subjective (the goal of the speaker) and objective ((independent of the speaker, ways to ensure recognition of this goal by the listener). the contradiction is interpreted as the antinomy of the intentional and the conventional in the speech act.
The concept of intention (intention) of the speaker was introduced into the categorical apparatus of TRA by Austin's followers in order to clarify his ideas regarding the illocutionary level of speech act analysis.
The logician P. Grice defined in terms of intention the concept of the subjective meaning of an utterance, or “speaker’s meaning”, a concept expressed by the verb mean in the context “L means something by x” “L meant something under x” (see p. 158). According to Grice, the subjective meaning of an utterance is the speaker's intention to obtain a certain result with its help, thanks to the listener's awareness of this intention. Strawson and Searle each modify this concept in their own way (see pp. 136-140 and 159-160, respectively) and come to the conclusion that the intention to be recognized, or communicative intention ("open intention" according to Strawson), is the most essential moment in the definition of illocution2.
1 Wed. with the definition of the meaning of the statement in the Soviet psycholinguistic theory of speech activity (see "Fundamentals of the Theory of Speech Activity") and with the definition of the meaning of the sentence, understood as a unit of speech by V. A. Zvegintsev (3 in e g and n c e in V. A. Proposal and its relation..., pp. 193).
2 Wed. with a similar role of the concept of speech intent or speech will in the theory of expression by M. M. Bakhtin (see: Bakhtin M. M. Decree. soch., p. 256) *
If in the treatment of the intentional aspect of illocution different versions of TRA converge, then the same cannot be said about its conventional aspect. With regard to speech actions, we can speak of two different types of conventions. The first is linguistic conventions that operate at the level of the locutionary act and determine the locutionary, or linguistic, meaning of the utterance. In general, language conventions are not enough to explain the production and perception of a speech act at the illocutionary level. So, the same sentence I will talk to your parents can be used by the speaker with different intentions - just to inform the addressee, to assume an obligation, to stop or prevent any actions of the addressee, etc. Despite the fact that in relation to linguistic conventions in all these cases, identical actions are performed, in each of these cases the speaker performs different illocutionary acts - informs, promises, warns or threatens, and the listener understands what illocutionary act the speaker is performing. How then to explain the natural character of the production and perception of the illocutionary act?
Austin believed that the illocutionary act is also governed by conventions (see above, p. 15), although, unlike the locutionary act, these conventions are not properly linguistic. However, he failed to explain what these conventions are.
An expanded presentation of the illocutionary act as a conventional action can be found in Searle's article "What is a speech act?" (pp. 151-169). By replacing the notion of a convention with the notion of a rule, he tried to show that an illocutionary act is an action that obeys rules. At the same time, he divides all rules into regulative, streamlining “forms of behavior that existed before them” (for example, rules of etiquette), and constitutive ones, which “do not just regulate (but create ... new forms of behavior” (for example, rules various games).The author suggests that the semantics of language can be seen as a set of systems of constitutive rules, and "illocutionary acts are acts performed in accordance with these sets of constitutive rules" (p. 155). speech action is removed. It is no accident that Searle renounces the concept of locution. Instead of a locutionary act, he speaks of acts of reference and predication, and instead of a locutionary meaning, he uses the concept of a judgment (proposition), or propositional content of an utterance. The plan of the content of an utterance is also presented in the form of the formula , where I is the illocutionary force, and p is the judgment (see p. 171) Both components of the formula have a single conventional nature: they are constituted by the rules for the use of expressions that serve to refer to these components. The article reveals a set of usage rules for an indicator of the illocutionary power of a promise, derived from the conditions for the implementation of the promise act, and outlines a program for analyzing other types of speech acts on the same basis, implemented later in the work “Speech Acts” (see above, p. 7).
Searle's method of explaining the mechanism of transmission of intention from the speaker to the listener in the process of communication was an important step towards solving this problem. Instead of general and indefinite reasoning about the influence of the situational context of the utterance on the meaning conveyed by it, a number of aspects of the communication situation (in the form of preparatory conditions) were listed for the main types of speech acts, which are in a natural connection with the possible intention of the speaker (embodied in the essential condition) and thus contribute to its identification. However, the exaggeration of the role of language means in communication (see Searle's amendment to the definition of Grice's subjective meaning on p. 160) has led to the fact that Searle's rules have a rather narrow scope of application. They are valid only for statements in which there is one or another linguistic indicator of the communicativeness of intention - lexical, grammatical, prosodic - and this indicator is used in the literal sense. So, as a general approach to explaining the mechanism of verbal communication, the idea of a speech act as a completely conventional action turned out to be unacceptable.
Unlike Austin and Searle, Strawson considers not all illocutionary acts to be conventional, but only those that are actually ordered by non-linguistic social conventions (see pp. 132-136). Most speech acts that are conventional in the strict sense indicated belong to the realm of social institutions. Appointment to office, sentencing, capitulation, closing the meeting, giving a name - in these and similar speech acts, the connection between linguistic activity and extralinguistic practical activity is most clearly manifested. It is no coincidence that it was from the analysis of such statements that Austin derived the performative/constant dichotomy, which developed into the doctrine of three levels of speech action (see examples of performatives on p. 26). Searle (p. 185) singles out such acts into a special class - declarations. Whatever area of activity a conventional speech act belongs to, it retains its main difference from an unconventional act: to perform it, it is enough to act in strict accordance with the established procedure, and the result that this action is aimed at will be achieved. Strawson correctly points out that acts of this type, being an important part of the activity of communication, are not typical representatives of illocutionary acts. The main problem remains the explanation of how the recognition of the speaker's communicative intention is ensured in speech acts that are not regulated by social conventions.
So, in the form of a question about how the understanding of the illocutionary power of an utterance is ensured, the TRA raised a question about the factors due to which utterances acquire a true meaning in the process of communication, becoming carriers of the communicants' speech intent and woven into the structure of their extralinguistic activity - a question on which semantic theories operating with isolated sentences, regardless of the degree of their formal perfection, could not in principle give an answer.
And the development of TPA can be viewed as a movement along the path of a gradual expansion of the area of these factors.
One of the ways to identify these factors, understood as different aspects of the illocutionary act, from the very beginning in TRA was the construction of a classification of illocutionary acts.
5
The first such classification belongs to Austin (see pp. 118-128). Austin believed that in order to understand the essence of illocution, it is necessary to collect and classify verbs that denote actions performed during speaking, and can be used to explication the power of an utterance - illocutionary verbs1.
Austin's classification of illocutionary verbs from the point of view of the current level of development of lexical semantics looks like a very rough approximation to the complex structure of this semantic field2. Searle criticized it in the article "Classification (of illocutionary acts" (see here, collection). He rightly pointed out the illegitimacy of mixing illocutionary acts, which are the reality of speech communication and do not depend on a specific language, ih illocutionary verbs, which are a specific reflection of this reality in the vocabulary of a particular language.
1 See the development of this approach to the study of the structure of a speech act in: Ballmer T. T., Brennenstuhl W. Speech act classification: A study in the lexical analysis of English speech activity verbs. Berl;n etc., 1981.
2 Wed. with the way this structure is presented in Wierzbicka's book: Wierz-bicka. semantic primitives. Frankfurt-am-M., 1972, p. 122-147.
3 See, for example: Vendler Z. Res Cogitans. Ithaca etc., 1972; and also works: Fraser B. A partial analysis of vernacular performative verbs; McCawley J. Remarks on lexicography of performative verbs, published in Proceedings of the Texas conference on performatives, presuppositions and impli-catures, ed. by A. Rogers et al. Austin, 1977.
Searle's classification, which he builds specifically as a classification of acts and not of verbs, represents a significant step forward in comparison with a number of previous experiments,3 being the first attempt at a universal classification of illocutionary acts. The basis of this classification is 12 features, which the author himself calls "directions of differences between illocutionary acts" (see pp. 172-177). And although this list of signs can be criticized in turn (not all signs are essential, mutually independent and have a clear meaning), it expands the area of factors involved in the transmission by the speaker and the perception of the listener of the actual meaning of the statement. There appears such an important factor as the relation of the speech act to the preceding discourse. What was expressed by the communicants by the time of the next speech act plays a role both in the formation of the communicative intention of the speaker and in his recognition by the listener.
The area of factors that determine the speech action at the level of illocution expands even more when TRA is faced with the need to explain the phenomenon of indirect speech acts - speech actions, the illocutionary purpose of which is not directly reflected in the language structure of the used statement1. iB in the narrow sense, indirect speech acts are only statements in which some standard way of indirectly expressing the goal is presented, that is, a linguistic expression that, while retaining its main, direct purpose of the indicator of illocutionary power x, is regularly used as an indicator of illocutionary power y (for example, a block diagram the question could you (do something)? is regularly used to express polite inducement)2.
1 Wed. with the concept of a projective text in the book: Vereshchagin E.M., Kos-tomarovV. D. Language and culture. M., 1983, p. 137-138.
2 Wed. with a distinction between primary and secondary functions of sentences in the monograph: Russian Grammar. M., 1982, vol. II, p. 394-396.
3 See: S a d o c k J. M. Towards a linguistic theory of speech acts. New York etc., 1974.
4 See: G g i c e H. P. Logic and conversation. - In: Syntax and semantics*, vol. 3, New York, 1975. For principles and rules of communication, see also La ko if R. The logic of politeness; or minding your p "s and q" s. - In: "Papers from the 9th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society", Chicago, 1973; Rozhdestvensky Yu. V. On the rules of speech according to proverbs and sayings. - "Pa-remiological collection". M., 1978; Pocheptsov G. G. ml. Semantic analysis of the labeling of communication. - "Semantics and representation of knowledge". Tartu, 1980; Demyankov V. 3. Conventions, rules and strategies of communication. - “Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Literature and Language Series, 1981, No. 4.
The opinion was expressed that indirect speech acts (in the narrow sense) should be considered as a manifestation of linguistic polysemy3. Searle, challenging this point of view in his article "Indirect Speech Acts" (see this, Sat.), shows that indirect speech acts, regardless of whether the method of their implementation is standardized, are based on the same mechanism of indirect expression speaker's intentions. Resorting for one reason or another (for example, out of politeness) to an indirect way of expressing his goal, the speaker counts not only on the interlocutor's linguistic knowledge, but also on his various non-linguistic knowledge: knowledge of the principles of communication such as Grice's maxims of cooperative dialogue4, knowledge of the conditions for the success of speech acts (see pp. 160-167) and, finally, “encyclopedic” knowledge (ideas about the world, the role of which in the process of understanding is the main object of study in research on artificial intelligence)1. So, to the factors that determine the actual meaning of the statement (= illocutionary function + propositional content), two extremely important ones are added - the knowledge of the communicants about the principles of communication and their "encyclopedic" knowledge.
7
Summing up the consideration of the standard theory of speech acts, we briefly list the main problems of the theory of speech activity, to the solution of which it made a positive contribution.
Considering the speech act as a multi-level formation and highlighting the illocutionary level as the main object of study, TRA demonstrated the importance of taking into account the speaker's goal (intention) to be recognized in order to explain the processes of speech interaction. On the one hand, the relationship of intention with other extralinguistic factors was revealed in the form of a correspondence between the illocutionary goal (= essential condition of the speech act) and the circumstances of the speech act (fixed as preparatory and other conditions) - the psychological state of the speaker, his interests, social status , his ideas about the situation of communication, including the listener with his knowledge, interests, social status. On the other hand, the main forms of reflection of the speaker's illocutionary goal in the language structure of the used sentence were identified.
In addition, the TRA will touch upon a number of other issues that are within the competence of the theory of speech activity. This is a problem of great practical importance in the typology of communicative failures, to which TRA contributed with its classification of failures of performative utterances (see p. 35) and the doctrine of the conditions for the success of speech acts. This is also the problem of the typology of primary speech genres2, which is solved in TRA with the help of an inventory and classification of illocutionary acts.
1 On the classification of knowledge in relation to the problems of linguistics, see Parshin P. B. On the question of linguistically oriented classification of knowledge. - “Dialogue systems and knowledge representation”. Tartu, 1981.
2 See: Bakhtin M.M. Decree. op., p. 259.
Of course, due to a number of reasons - the lack of an adequate methodological base, the extreme narrowing of the object of study, the absolutization of the role of the illocutionary goal while underestimating other goals achieved in communication, an extra-social understanding of the act of communication, a static point of view on the object - TRA does not answer many important questions of the theory communication.
In particular, it does not explain how the illocutionary goal correlates with the practical one, does not reveal the links between the strategic goal of speech interaction and the tactical goals of the speech acts that make it up, does not show how a person's belonging to a certain group and to a certain culture affects the characteristics of his speech behavior. .
The positive results of the TPA, of course, cannot be considered as the final solutions to the relevant problems and need to be rethought from the standpoint of the Marxist theory of objective activity.
Creation of an adequate theory of speech activity is an interdisciplinary task. Soviet linguists, along with psychologists, sociologists, and logicians, have been actively working in this direction in recent years. In addition to research in line with the psycholinguistic theory of activity, it should be noted here the work carried out within the framework of the “Dialogue” project, conducted under the auspices of the Scientific Council on the Problem of “Artificial Intelligence” of the Committee for System Analysis under the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR1, as well as research coordinated by the interuniversity problem group “Semantics and pragmatics of verbal communication. It seems that the publication of the main (works on the theory of speech acts translated into Russian) will contribute to the intensification of research in this area.
1 See in particular: Kibrik A. E. On the construction of a linguistic model of communicative interaction. - "Methodological problems of artificial intelligence". Tartu, 1983; Debrenn M. M., Narignani A. S. Speech act as an element of dialogue interaction. - There; Y ym X. Ya. et al. Reasoning and dialogue: experts as a link between high and low level reasoning. - "Principal questions of the theory of knowledge". Tartu, 1984; Sat. "Psychological problems of creation and use of computers". M., 1985.
The theory of speech acts is a kind of functional approach to language, the main provisions of which were formulated in the works of J. Austin "Word as Action" and J. R. Searle "What is a Speech Act". Speech acts are understood as illocutionary speech acts, i.e. actions by which the speaker affirms, gives a command, congratulates, warns, etc. , in other words, actions denoted in English with the help of verbs and verb combinations state “state, state, assert, assert” assert, declare”, describe “describe”, warn “warn”, remark “notice”, comment “comment”, command “command”, order “order”, request “ask”, criticize “criticize”, apologize “apologize”, censure “condemn”, approve “approve”, welcome “greet”, promise “promise”, express approval “express approval ”, express regret “to express regret”, etc. It is the illocutionary speech act that is considered in this theory as the minimal and basic unit of linguistic communication. Speech acts (RA) are analyzed in three aspects by the rules governing their use:
The content of RA (judgment, or propositions expressed in them);
RA values formed by the interaction. “what we mean when we speak and what the sentence means in the language we speak”, i.e. conventional and intentional components (J.R. Searle).
Also, the subject of interest in the theory of RA are such pragmatic characteristics of the statement as the conditions of sincerity, success, etc. A great contribution to the theory of RA was made by G.P. Grice, who developed the concept of "implicature" and formulated the Principle of Cooperation. The Principle of Cooperation says "Your communicative contribution at this step of the dialogue should be the one that the jointly accepted goal (direction) of this dialogue requires" and includes four postulates - Quantity, Quality, Relationship and Method.
The theory of speech acts laid the foundations of modern linguistic pragmatics. At the same time, J. Austin is called an outstanding English philosopher of language.
Arutyunova N. D. Speech act // Linguistic Encyclopedic Dictionary. M., 1990
New in foreign linguistics. Issue. 17: Theory of speech acts. M., 1986
How to do Things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Ed. J. O. Urmson, Oxford: Clarendon
Grice H. P. Logic and conversation // "Syntax and semantics", v. 3, ed. by P. Cole and J. L. Morgan, N. Y., Academic Press, 1975, p. 41-58
Searle John R. What is a speech act? // "Philosophy in America" ed. Max Black, London, Alien and Unwin, 1965, p. 221-239
Discourse as a structure. speech act
Speech act - a purposeful speech action performed in accordance with the principles and rules of speech behavior adopted in a given society; a unit of normative socio-speech behavior, considered within the framework of a pragmatic situation.
The main features of the speech act:
- intent (intentionality)
- purposefulness
- conventionality
Speech acts are always correlated with the face of the speaker.
The sequence of speech acts creates discourse.
A holistic and developed theory of speech acts has developed [only] within the framework of linguistic philosophy under the influence of L. Wittgenstein's ideas about the multiple purposes of language and their inseparability from life forms: the interaction of language and life takes the form of "language games" based on certain social regulations.
The foundations of the theory of speech acts were laid by John Austin (“How to do things with words”).
The speech act involves the speaker and the addressee, acting as carriers of certain mutually agreed upon social roles or functions.
Participants in a speech act have a fund of general speech skills (speech competencies), knowledge and ideas about the world.
The composition of the speech act includes the atmosphere of speech and the fragment of reality that its content concerns.
According to Austin, to perform a speech act means:
(1) pronounce articulate sounds belonging to the generally accepted language code.
(2) construct an utterance from the words of a given language according to the rules of its grammar.
(3) to provide the statement with meaning and reference, i.e. correlate with reality by making a locution.
(4) to give the speech a purposefulness that turns it into an illocutionary act - the expression of a communicative goal in the course of pronouncing a statement.
(5) cause the desired consequences (perlocution), i.e. influence the mind and behavior of the addressee, create a new situation.
Schematically, the speech act model can be represented as follows:
Talk to change
John Serle highlights in a speech act:
- the act of pronunciation (utterance act)
- propositional act
reference and predication
- illocutionary act
speaker's goal setting
purposefulness; "effective intonation"; illocutionary force of the speech act (or potential). It includes:
-illocutionary goal (e.g. inducement)
- its intensity
-way to achieve the goal
- features of dependent proposition, etc.
individual conditions
Some illocutionary goals can be achieved by facial expressions, gestures (i.e. without direct speech, without pronouncing words).
Verbs: swear, promise, etc. - performative
brag, threaten, insult - non-performative
Main classes of speech acts:
1) representatives (the train has arrived)
2) directives, acts of inducement (Go away! including the demand for information: What time is it?)
3) commissions (acts of acceptance of obligations), for example, I promise to come on time.
4) expressives (acts expressing an emotional state), including social etiquette formulas (behabatives, Austin). E.g. Sorry to bother you.
5) declaratives (acts of establishing: appointment to a position, assignment of titles, names, sentencing).
The speech act is characterized by conditions of success, failure to comply with which leads to illocutionary failures.
Situation + personal factors
(social roles) (e.g. sincerity condition; intentions).
Success conditions assume that the addressee is able to recognize the illocutionary force of the speech act, which must be verbally or non-verbally expressed.
Speech acts can be direct or indirect.
Indirect speech acts are always conventional (e.g. modalized question).
Something is stuffy here - an indirect speech act.
I wish it wasn't stuffy here - a direct speech act.
When we analyze communication, we must take into account not only all aspects of the generation mechanism, starting from the stage of motivation, but also the whole range of factors that "provoke" the generation of speech and determine its perception and understanding. The focus should be on the communicative act in all its variety of manifestations.
Communication (communication) is a process unfolding in time and space.
A speech act is understood as a communicative action, a structural unit of linguistic communication, a discretely allocated beat, a quantum of discourse.
The communicative act has two "plans", two components: situation and discourse. A situation is a fragment of an objectively existing reality, of which a verbal act can also be a part. Discourse is a verbalized activity that includes not only linguistic, but also extralinguistic components.
H. Parret: five theoretical context models:
-speech context = cotext
-existential context (implies the world of objects, states, events, i.e. what the statement refers to in the act of reference)
- situational context
-actional context (constituted by speech acts)
-psychological context
V. Krasnykh: three types of context:
- microcontext (explicitly contained in the microtext, the immediate speech environment)
-macrocontext (explicitly contained in a macrotext, a distant speech environment)
-context-shadow (implicitly contained in the situation)
The same understanding of the context by the communicants is part of the presupposition.
The presupposition is part of the context, actualizing in it.
Problems in communication arise if one of the communicants does not understand the meanings that are relevant for a given communicative act, i.e.
- when for one of the communicants the communicative act remains closed (I guess what you mean, but I don’t understand what exactly);
-unconscious; non-existent (I don't understand at all what you are talking about and what you mean).
A speech act is a separate act of speech, in normal cases it is a two-way process of generating a text, covering speaking and proceeding in parallel and simultaneously auditory perception and understanding of what is heard. In written communication, the speech act covers, respectively, writing and reading (visual perception and understanding) of what is written, and the participants in communication can be distant from each other in time and space. A speech act is a manifestation of speech activity.
Text is created in a speech act. Linguists designate by this term not only a written, fixed one way or another text, but also any “speech work” created by someone (whether described or just spoken) of any length - from a one-word replica to a whole story, poem or book. In inner speech, an “inner text” will be created, that is, a speech work that has developed “in the mind”, but has not been embodied orally or in writing.
Contents [remove]
1 Components of a speech act
2 Types of speech acts
3 Bibliography
4 See also
5 Links
[edit] Components of a speech act
K. Buhler singled out three components of a speech act: “sender”, “receiver”, “objects and situations” and correlated them with certain functions of the language (in brackets are the names of the functions according to R. O. Jacobson, see the next paragraph): expressions (emotive, “focused on the addressee”), appeals (conative, addressee-oriented) and representations (referential, communication of reality). See Buhler K. Theory of language.
R. O. Jakobson adds to the components of the speech act identified by K. Buhler three more: contact, code, message, and names the functions corresponding to these components (phatic, or contact-establishing; metalinguistic, in the implementation of which the subject of speech is the code-language itself; and poetic ). “Sender”, “receiver”, “objects and situations” are called by Jacobson “addresser”, “addressee” and “context”, respectively. See R. O. Jacobson. Linguistics and Poetics (text: Linguistics and Poetics).
[edit] Types of speech acts
straight;
- indirect or indirect speech acts (take place as a result of a kind of pragmatic transposition)
Performative
[edit] Bibliography
John R. Searle. What is a speech act? - In: "Philosophy in America" ed. Max Black, London, Alien and Unwin, 1965, p. 221-239.
Vinokur T. G. Speaking and listening. Variants of speech behavior. M., 1993.
Paducheva E. V. Statement and its correlation with reality. M., 1985
New in foreign linguistics. Issue. 17: Theory of speech acts. M., 1986.
Arutyunova N. D. Speech act // Linguistic Encyclopedic Dictionary. - M.: SE, 1990. - ISBN 5; 85270; 031; 2.
Models of purely Russian speech acts
Research in the field of pragmatics shows that the main types of speech acts can be found in all languages, but nevertheless, there are speech acts that are specific to a group of languages or even to one language.
The study of the Russian language allowed us to identify a number of specific features of some models of Russian speech acts, as well as to identify some speech acts avoided by native speakers of the Russian language.
Thus, Russians do not like to explicate the communicative task. This, in our opinion, explains the relatively rare use of performatives in Russian communicative behavior, cf.:
* - I protest; You sold me expired canned goods. Perhaps this is due to the branched case system in Russian, where the case takes over the expression of what is being said, for example: - Tea? - Salmon?
In Russian communication, readiness to perform a causal action is rarely expressed by linguistic means (for example, in a response: - Right now! Now!).
In the speech act of advice, Russians do not like to use the modal predicates to be able, to want, which would make the speech act indirect, preference is given to the direct speech act of advice.
On the other hand, Russians like to use the technique of communicative duplication when begging, asking and refusing, for example: - Go, go, buy, bring bread; - No, no, no, no, no .... etc.
In response to a request for information about taking/not taking an action (for example, Are you going to work?), Russians prefer to use Yes, I'm going/No, I'm not going models, instead of the seemingly more logical Yes/No.
In the speech act of threat, Russians prefer to use I-statements instead of mentioning possible retribution, for example: - I'll chat to you! I will give you!
When saying goodbye to guests, Russians like to use causative verbs: - Come in! Call! Write! This type of Russian communicative behavior in a farewell situation often causes an inadequate reaction of foreigners: instead of the expected Russian speech etiquette Thank you!, they say: With great pleasure! or ask: When?, Why?.
High frequency in Russian communication are verbless models and truncated constructions such as: - Here I am for you ... (with a threat), - No TV (with a ban).
When persuading and begging Russians, models with the particle nu are often used: - Well, where are you going? Well, I don't understand! Well, do you want me to do everything?
In the speech act of remarking against the background of increased irritation, Russians often use possessive pronouns: - Put your slippers away!
As you know, the situation of criticism almost always leads to conflict. An analysis of the methods of criticism made it possible to identify about twenty language models of speech acts of criticism. According to surveys of informants, the most frequent in the Russian language were models that are the most conflicting and annoying to the listener: this is criticism-surprise - How, don't you know that ?!; criticism-fear - I am very worried about your behavior; criticism, reproach and reproach - Why are you so -; How many times can you repeat?..., instead of almost conflict-free language models: criticism-support - Nothing, next time it will work out; and constructive criticism - How much time do you need to correct a mistake? How can I help you?
It would be interesting to continue this study in terms of identifying not only purely Russian, but also purely Finnish speech acts.
"Conditions of sincerity" by J. Searle as a prerequisite for successful communication
A.I. Migunov
Education. Communication. Values. (Problems, discussions, prospects). According to the materials of the round table "Communicative Practices in Education", November 19, 2004. - Ed. S.I. Angelica. - St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg Philosophical Society, 2004. - P. 30-33
In his classification of illocution, Searle concludes that “the number of different actions that we perform with the help of language is rather limited: we tell others what the state of things is; we are trying to get others to do something; we commit ourselves to doing something; we express our feelings and attitudes; finally, with the help of statements, we make changes in the existing world. Thus, he distinguishes 5 main illocutionary forces: assertive, commissive, directive, expressive, declarative. Each of these elementary illocutions includes a certain set of characteristics on the basis of which it differs from the other. These are a kind of constitutive rules, that is, rules, the fulfillment of which means the fulfillment of the corresponding illocutionary act. Searle, in The Classification of Illocutionary Acts, identifies 12 "meaningful dimensions" that allow the listener to distinguish between illocutionary acts. But he considers three to be the most important: the illocutionary goal, the direction of realization of the correspondence between words and the world (direction of fit), and the psychological states expressed by the illocutionary act, later called the condition of sincerity.
In constructing the logic of illocution, an important question that must be answered before giving an acceptable definition of the logical consequence relation in relation to reasoning in the illocutionary context is the preservation of which characteristics of a speech act is guaranteed by the logical consequence relation. The truth characteristic refers to the propositional content of the speech act, but the illocutionary force, that is, the communicative function, does not have a truth value. Or has? In other words, we must either reinterpret the category of truth to include an illocutionary context, or discover and formulate other characteristics of speech acts that, when integrated into the modern concept of truth, will allow us to understand the grounds for our agreement with a commissive, directive, or declarative speech act. We confirm a judgment about the world because it is true, that is, it corresponds to the actual state of affairs in the world and/or our understanding of it. But why do we affirm a speech act, directives, for example?
Daniel Vanderveken, developing the ideas of J. Searle, along with the truth of the propositional content of the speech act, highlights the success (success) and effectiveness (satisfaction) of the speech act as complementary to the truth characteristic. As Vanderveken shows, one cannot understand the nature of illocutionary acts without understanding their conditions for success and effectiveness. The conditions for the success and effectiveness of elementary illocutionary acts are not reducible to the conditions for the truth of their propositional contents. Therefore, an important task, both in the logic of speech acts and in the semantics of natural language, is to develop the proposed concept of success and efficiency, integrating it with the truth theory for propositions.
He no longer distinguishes 12, like Searle, but six components that determine the conditions for the success and effectiveness of speech acts: illocutionary goal (there are five of them, like Searle, but he considers the directions for realizing the correspondence between words and the world as the basis for distinguishing illocutionary goals), mode of attainment, propositional content conditions, preconditions, sincerity conditions, and intensity. According to Vandervecken, the illocutionary act F(P) is successfully performed in a given context of utterance if and only if, first, in this context, the speaker succeeds in achieving the illocutionary goal of the power F in the utterance P with the mode of achieving F, and P satisfies the conditions of propositional content F, second, the speaker succeeds in conjecturing the propositions defined by the preconditions F, and finally, he also succeeds in expressing with intensity F the mental states defined by the sincerity conditions F about the fact represented by the propositional content P. Thus the speaker makes a promise in some context of utterance, when (1) the illocutionary goal of its utterance is to agree to perform some action A (illocutionary goal), (2) by uttering this speech act, the speaker undertakes to perform action A (method of achievement), (3), propositional the content of the utterance is that the speaker performs action A (condition propositional content), (4) the speaker assumes that he is able to perform action A and that this action A is in the interests of the listener (preconditions), and finally (5) he expresses with strong intensity the intention to perform this action (conditions of sincerity and intensity) . Moreover, both Searle and Vanderveken, explicating the conditions of sincerity, connect them with the expressed psychological states of the speaker.
It is this interpretation of the conditions of sincerity that is the object of the objection in this article. What does it mean to succeed in expressing mental states, psychological states? Attempts to assess the success of a speech act in this case rests on the search for criteria for the success of expressing a psychological state, and illocutionary logic runs the risk of appearing as a description of possible transitions from a sincere expression of some mental states to an expression of other mental states with logical necessity. It seems that the logic of illocutionary acts should be freed from psychological apagogies in the analysis of the correctness of reasoning.
The weakness of this place in the theory of speech acts is indicated by the founders of the Amsterdam school of argumentation, theorists of the pragma-dialectical approach to the analysis of argumentative discourse, Frans van Yemeren and Rob Grootendors in their work Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussions. One of the principles of their approach is the principle of externalization. According to this principle, researchers of argumentative discourse should investigate what was said, presented explicitly or implicitly in verbal form, and not those ideas, motives and other mental states that could underlie the statements. Logic, the theory of argumentation, does not investigate what a person actually thought and felt when he made statements. So it is necessary to translate all psychological terms into objective ones.
Yemeren and Grootendorst formulate two conditions that are important in the context of our conversation: (1) the certainty of a speech act is given not only by the speaker, but also by the listener; (2) the illocutionary definiteness of a speech act depends on the place it occupies in the context in which it is performed.
Searle himself notes: “... what we can mean is a function of what we say. The subjective meaning is due not only to intention, but also to convention.” It is impossible to say “it is warm here” meaning that it is cold here. Therefore, the listener, guided in the recognition of a speech act by linguistic conventions, has every right to define illocution in such a way as is required by the corresponding constitutive rules of language. The speaker who violates the conditions of sincerity by performing an illocutionary act destroys the dialogue, just as a madman or a parrot destroys it, disappearing as a subject of speech. A madman or a parrot, whatever they say, says nothing to the listener. A parrot may say "Time to sleep!", but he
Can't advise going to bed. The speech act as a real element of speech is produced in the dialogue, only in the dialogue is there the illocutionary force of the speech act. You can't say anything if no one can hear you. Moreover, the speech act is defined by the listener, and only by the listener. On the basis of that system of constitutive rules, those conventions of language that testify to his knowledge of the language, he endows both propositional and communicative meaning to the speech that he hears, including his own. He himself says something definite, primarily because he hears himself. We do not come to the right place because we know where we are going, but because we know how to navigate the terrain, and therefore we know where we are going.
It is not enough to rename the conditions of sincerity into conditions of responsibility. It is important to understand that the fulfillment of these conditions is evidence of reasonableness and sanity.
The conditions of responsibility for argumentative speech acts require that the speaker not only believe that listeners can accept as true the propositional content of his argumentative speech acts, but also consider it to be true himself; he not only believes that his listeners will accept his reasoning as correct, that is, substantiating his point of view, but he himself considers it as such. What happens if the speaker does not meet these conditions? The same thing that happens when a reasonable person tries to talk to a parrot - no dialogue happens. The same thing happens when one of the participants in the dialogue says that he cannot object to the premises of your reasoning, that is, he considers them true, and believes that your reasoning was logically flawless, but cannot agree with your conclusion. We refuse to recognize this person as reasonable, and therefore as an interlocutor. And we made this conclusion without any reference to psychology and the inconsistency of mental states with statements, the grounds of which they were supposed to be. Of course, in real discussions we quite often encounter hypocrisy, deceit, and insincerity. Sometimes it doesn't open right away. But if the proponent does not believe in the truth of the propositional content of argumentative speech acts, then he does not participate in the argumentative dialogue, and this is soon revealed as soon as he is powerless to substantiate them. But even in a conversation with a madman, you do not always understand after the first phrase who you are dealing with. But if you understand, it is not because it is possible to establish that his statements do not correspond to his intentions. On the contrary, first you establish violations of the norms of rational speech, and then you make an assumption about his mental inferiority.
1. Vezhbitska A. Speech acts // New in foreign linguistics. Issue 17.-M.: Progress, 1986. S.
Speech acts involve the speaker and the addressee, acting as carriers of certain social roles or functions agreed upon among themselves. Participants in speech acts have a fund of general speech skills (speech competence), knowledge and ideas about the world. The structure of the speech act includes the situation of speech (context) and the fragment of reality that is being discussed. To perform a speech act means: to pronounce articulate sounds that belong to a commonly understood language code; construct an utterance from the words of a given language according to the rules of its grammar; to provide the statement with meaning and meaning (i.e., to correlate it with reality), having carried out the utterance (eng. Locution); give purposefulness to the speech (eng. Illocution); influence the consciousness or behavior of the addressee, cause the desired consequences (eng. Perlocution).
Austin therefore distinguishes three types of speech acts:
1. Locutionary - the act of speaking in itself, the act of ascertaining. For example, "He told me to shoot her."
2. Illocutionary - expresses intention to another person, outlines a goal. In fact, this kind of act is an expression of a communicative goal. For example, "He urged me to shoot her."
In the two properties of an illocutionary act - intentionality and conventionality - lies the contradiction inherent in a speech act between two moments inextricably linked in it: subjective (the goal of the speaker) and objective (independent of the speaker, ways to ensure recognition of this goal by the listener).
So, the main feature of an illocutionary act is its purpose. This does not mean any goal, for the achievement of which we perform a speech act, but only one that, in accordance with our intention, should be recognized by the addressee. Only such a goal, open for recognition, is called illocutionary, and, in principle, it may not coincide with the true goal of the speaker. So, wanting to send the annoying guest out and knowing that he is in a quarrel with NN and is unlikely to want to meet him, the host can say: Yesterday NN called and said that he would come in today around nine. The true goal of the speaker - to induce the listener to leave - cannot be considered as the illocutionary goal of his speech act, because it is hidden and it is not at all necessary (and in some cases undesirable) for the addressee to recognize it in order to achieve it. The illocutionary purpose of the speech act in this case will be the purpose of providing the addressee with some information. This goal, and in this case only it, is presented openly to be identified as such. Therefore, this speech act at the illocutionary level of analysis will be considered as a message, not an impulse.
3. Perlocutionary - causes a purposeful effect and expresses the impact on the behavior of another person. The purpose of such an act is to bring about the desired consequences. For example, "He talked me into shooting her."
Strictly speaking, three types of speech acts do not exist in their pure form, in any of them all three moments are present: locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary. Austin called the functions of speech acts illocutionary forces, and the corresponding verbs - illocutionary (for example, ask, ask, forbid). Some illocutionary goals can be achieved by facial expressions, gestures. However, an oath, a promise, etc. impossible without speech.
Since the perlocutionary effect is outside the actual speech act, the theory of speech acts is focused on the analysis of illocutionary forces, and the terms "speech act" and "illocutionary act" are often used interchangeably. The most generalized illocutionary goals are deposited in the grammatical structure of the sentence. To do this, it is enough to compare narrative, interrogative, incentive sentences. Illocutionary goals play an important role in the construction of dialogic speech, the coherence of which is ensured by their consistency: a question requires an answer, a reproach requires justification or an apology, etc.
When classifying speech acts, the illocutionary goal, the psychological state of the speaker, the direction of the relationship between the propositional content of the speech act and the state of affairs in the world (reference), the attitude towards the interests of the speaker and the addressee, etc. are taken into account. The following main classes of speech acts are distinguished:
- informative - messages (representatives): "The train has arrived";
- acts of inducement (directives, prescriptions): "Go away!", including the demand for information: "What time is it?";
- acts of acceptance of obligations (commissions): “I promise to come on time”;
- acts expressing an emotional state (expressives), including social etiquette formulas: “Sorry for the trouble”;
- acts of establishment (declarations, verdicts, operatives), such as appointments, assignment of names and titles, sentencing, etc.
Incidentally, the meaning of a speech act cannot be reduced to the meaning of its propositional content. One and the same proposition (one and the same judgment) is capable of being included in different speech acts. Thus, the proposition "I will come tomorrow" can be a promise, a threat, a message. An understanding of a speech act that provides an adequate response presupposes a correct interpretation of its illocutionary force. And this is impossible without knowledge of the context. In some cases, for the effectiveness of a speech act, a certain social situation is necessary (an order, a sentence, etc. are valid only in the mouths of people endowed with appropriate powers and are based on social institutions). In other cases, the success of a speech act depends on personal factors.
Paul Grice proposed a series of postulates describing the process of communication. This issue arose when not linguists, but philosophers turned to the analysis of more complex variants of human communication. For example, why, in response to a question at the table: "Could you reach for the salt?", we do not say "yes" and continue to eat, but for some reason we pass the salt. What makes us perceive this question not as a question, but as an indirectly expressed request?
P. Grice united a number of his postulates under the general heading of the "cooperative principle": "Make your contribution to the conversation as it is required at this stage in accordance with the accepted goal or direction of the conversation in which you are participating" . This general requirement is realized within the categories of Quantity, Quality, Ratio and Method.
The Quantity category is realized within the framework of the following postulates:
1. Make your contribution as informative as it needs to be.
2. Don't make your contribution more informative than necessary.
For example, when you fix a car and ask for four screws, you are expected to get four in return, not two or six.
The Quality category requires telling the truth:
1. Don't say what you think is a lie.
2. Don't say things you don't have enough evidence to back up.
For example, when you ask for sugar for a cake, you should not get salt; if you need a spoon, you should not get a "deceptive" spoon, for example, made of foil.
The Relationship category needs to be relevant.
For example: when making a pie, one or another ingredient is required at each stage, it is not needed sooner or later, although in principle it is needed.
The Mode category requires being clear and understandable, avoiding ambiguity, length, etc.
P. Grice analyzes many examples using the proposed maxims. For example:
- I ran out of gas.
- There's a garage around the corner.
According to the requirement to be relevant, it is expected that this garage has gasoline, that the garage is open at that time, etc.
A speech act is the minimum unit of speech activity, singled out and studied in the theory of speech acts - a doctrine that is the most important component of linguistic pragmatics. A speech act is a purposeful speech action performed in accordance with the principles and rules of speech behavior adopted in a given society; a unit of normative socio-speech behavior, considered within the framework of a pragmatic situation.
Speech acts involve the speaker and the addressee, acting as carriers of social roles or functions. Participants in speech acts have general speech skills (speech competence), knowledge and ideas about the world. The composition of the speech act includes the situation of speech (context) and the fragment of reality under discussion. To perform a speech act means to pronounce articulate sounds that belong to a commonly understood language code; construct an utterance from the words of a given language according to the rules of its grammar; to provide the statement with meaning and meaning, having carried out the speech (English locution); give purposefulness to the speech (eng. Illocution); influence the consciousness or behavior of the addressee, cause the desired consequences (eng. Perlocution).
Depending on the circumstances or conditions in which a speech act is performed, it can be either successful or unsuccessful. To be successful, a speech act must be at least appropriate. Otherwise, the speaker will face a communicative failure, or a communicative failure.
The conditions that must be met in order for a speech act to be recognized as appropriate are called the conditions for the success of a speech act. So, if a mother says to her daughter: “Go eat!”, she thereby performs a speech act, the purpose of which is to induce the addressee to perform the designated action. If the daughter has not yet eaten, then this speech act is appropriate, therefore, successful. If the conditions are not met (the daughter ate or she became ill), the mother's speech act will be inappropriate. But even if all the conditions that ensure the relevance of the speech act are met, the result to which it will lead may or may not correspond to the goal set by the speaker. In this example, the result of the mother's speech act can be either the consent of the daughter to perform the specified action, or the refusal of it. Refusal in this case can be both motivated (the desire to finish reading the book) and unmotivated.
The speech act is a rather complex phenomenon. J. Austin identifies three types of speech act:
- - locutionary - the act of speaking in itself, the act of ascertaining. For example, "She told me to pick you up."
- - illocutionary - expresses intention to another person, outlines a goal. In fact, this kind of act is an expression of a communicative goal. For example, "She asked me to pick you up."
- - perlocutionary - causes a purposeful effect and expresses the impact on the behavior of another person. The purpose of such an act is to produce consequences. For example, "She talked me into picking you up."
Three types of speech acts do not exist in their pure form, in any of them all three moments are present: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary. The functions of speech acts were called by J. Austin illocutionary forces, and the corresponding verbs were called illocutionary (for example, ask, ask, forbid). Some illocutionary goals can be achieved by facial expressions or gestures.
Since the perlocutionary effect is outside the speech act, speech act theory focuses on the analysis of illocutionary forces, and the terms "speech act" and "illocutionary act" are often used interchangeably. The most generalized illocutionary goals are deposited in the grammatical structure of the sentence. To do this, it is enough to compare narrative, interrogative, incentive sentences. Illocutionary goals play an important role in the construction of dialogic speech, the coherence of which is ensured by their consistency: a question requires an answer, a reproach requires justification or an apology.
When classifying speech acts, the illocutionary goal, the psychological state of the speaker, the direction of the relationship between the propositional content of the speech act and the state of affairs in the world (reference), the attitude towards the interests of the speaker and the addressee, etc. are taken into account. The following main classes of speech acts are distinguished:
- - informative - messages, that is, representative: "The concert is already underway";
- - acts of inducement (directives and prescriptions): “Speak!”, including the demand for information: “Who is the last one?”;
- - acts of acceptance of obligations (commissions): “I promise not to do this again”;
- - acts expressing an emotional state (expressives), as well as social etiquette formulas: “Sorry for the indiscreet question”;
- - establishing acts (declarations, verdicts, operatives), such as appointments, assignment of names and titles, sentencing, etc.
The locutionary act includes the pronunciation of sounds, the use of words, their linking according to the rules of grammar, the designation of certain objects with their help, as well as the attribution of certain properties and relations to these objects.
The speech act is divided into two components: the illocutionary function and the proposition. Thus, the content of the statement in the example considered above is decomposed into the propositional part "you are going to eat" and the illocutionary function "inducement".
Through speaking, a person produces some changes in the consciousness of his interlocutor, and the result obtained may or may not correspond to the purpose of the speech act. The speech act here appears as a perlocutionary one. So, in the above example, the mother's statement could, for example, distract her daughter and cause her displeasure.
J. Austin, who laid the foundations of the theory of speech acts in his lectures of the second half of the 1950s (“How to Do Things with Words”), did not give a precise definition of the concept of an illocutionary act, but only gave examples of such acts (question, answer, informing, assurance, warning, appointment, criticism).
The class of sentences that explicitly expresses the illocutionary function of the utterance is called performative sentences. The basis of the lexical-semantic structure of these sentences is an illocutionary verb - a verb belonging to a subclass of speaking verbs and containing components in its lexical meaning that indicate the purpose of speaking and certain conditions for the implementation of a speech action (ask, congratulate, assure, promise). However, the presence of an illocutionary verb is not a sufficient condition for a sentence to be performative. For this, it is also necessary that the illocutionary verb be used not to describe a certain situation, but in order to clarify what speech act the speaker performs when using this sentence. In other words, the illocutionary verb must be used performatively.
The semantic specificity of the performative sentence, its difference from the usual declarative sentence, is that the usual declarative sentence is used to represent a certain state of affairs, and the performative sentence serves to explication of the action being performed.
The classical form of a performative sentence has a subject expressed by the personal pronoun of the first person singular, and a predicate agreed with it in the form of the indicative mood of the present tense of the active voice. For example, "(I) promise to come." You can also add some more features: a person can be not only the first, but also the third (The Red Cross Organization and the Zorka Children's Health Center thank you for the help provided ...); the number may be plural; the time may be the future (I remind you that the final of the competition will take place on Saturday); pledge can be passive (you are declared husband and wife); mood can be subjunctive (I would advise you to watch this movie).
So, the main feature of an illocutionary act is its purpose. Only a goal that can be recognized is called illocutionary, although it may not coincide with the real goal of the speaker.
Illocutionary acts differ not only in their purpose, but also in a number of other ways. The most famous universal classification of illocutionary acts was built by the American logician and philosopher J. Searle. The basis of this classification is a group of features, which the author himself calls "directions of differences between illocutionary acts." The most significant of them are: the goal, the direction of the correspondence between the statement and reality (in the case of a message, the statement is brought into line with reality, in the case of an order, reality must be brought into line with the statement), the internal state of the speaker, the features of the propositional content of the speech act (for example, in a prediction, the content of a proposition refers to the future tense, and in a report, to the present or past), the connection of a speech act with extralinguistic institutions or institutions (for example, the speech act of appointing someone as one’s deputy implies the existence of some organization within which the speaker must be is endowed with appropriate powers, part of which he, with the help of this speech act, gives to another member of this organization).
Given these parameters, illocutionary acts, as already mentioned earlier, were divided by Searle into five main classes:
- - representatives aimed at reflecting the state of affairs in the world;
- - directives, aimed at inducing the addressee to act, suggest that the speaker has a corresponding desire, and their propositional content consists in performing / not performing some action in the future (requests, prohibitions, advice, instructions, calls, etc.).
- - commissives are used by the speaker in order to bind himself with an obligation to do / not do something, suggest that he has a corresponding intention, and their proposition always has the speaker as its subject (promise, oath, guarantee).
- Expressives are intended to express a certain psychological state of the speaker (feeling of gratitude, regret, joy).
- - declarations differ from the other four in terms of connection with extralinguistic institutions and the specifics of the correspondence between the statement and reality: declaring a certain state of affairs as existing, the speech act of the declaration thereby makes it exist in the real world (appointment to a post, declaration of war or peace).
There are speech acts that have features characteristic of several illocutionary classes, a kind of “mixed” types (a complaint is both representative, since it reflects a certain state of affairs in reality, and expressive, since it expresses the speaker’s dissatisfaction with this situation, and a directive, since the purpose of the complaint - not just inform the addressee, but encourage him to take appropriate measures).
Within the five main illocutionary classes, speech acts differ in a number of additional parameters:
- - correlation of the speech act with the previous text (answer and affirmation);
- - correlation of social statuses of communicants (order and demand);
- - a way of connecting a speech act with the interests of the speaker and the listener (congratulations and condolences);
- - the degree of intensity of the representation of the illocutionary goal (request and supplication).
There is an inextricable connection between the illocutionary function of a speech act and the conditions for its success, which allows the addressee of the speech act to correctly recognize its illocutionary function even when some of its essential features do not have special formal indicators in the language structure of the utterance used: the missing information is extracted from the circumstances of the communicative situations. So, the fact that the statement “Bring me a report” refers to the type of incentives (directives) tells us the grammatical form of the imperative mood of the verb, but nothing in the linguistic form of this statement tells us whether this is an order or a request. If we know that the speaker is the boss and the listener is his subordinate, we will understand that this is an order.
On the same connection between the illocutionary function of an utterance and the conditions for its success, the understanding of indirect speech acts is based - speech actions that are carried out with the help of statements that have one illocutionary function in their structure, but normally their illocutionary function is different. Examples of indirect speech acts are polite requests "disguised" as interrogative sentences (Could you make me some tea?) or statements that look like questions (rhetorical questions).
It should be noted that the meaning of a speech act cannot be reduced to the meaning of its propositional content. The same proposition (judgment) is capable of being included in different speech acts. Thus, the proposition "I'll be back" can be a promise, a threat, a message. Understanding a speech act, which provides an adequate response, requires the correct interpretation of its illocutionary force, which is impossible without knowledge of the context. In some cases, a certain social situation is necessary for the effectiveness of a speech act (for example, an order or a sentence is valid only when it is pronounced by people who have certain powers and rely on social institutions). In other cases, the success of a speech act depends on personal factors.
Searle's contribution to the theory of speech acts lies in isolating their rules and bringing these acts closer to the concept of intentionality. A speech act is a communication, a social connection of communicants that requires compliance with certain conditions and rules. Thus, a promise assumes that the listener trusts the speaker, and the speaker perceives his interlocutor in this capacity; both assume that the promise can in principle be kept; finally, the promiser assumes some responsibility. If he is dishonest, then communication is destroyed. According to Searle, there is a certain parallelism between the intentional mental states of the subject and speech acts. Both are united by intentionality, focus on the outside world. Faith, fear, hope, desire, contempt, disappointment, and so on can be intentional.
Searle also made certain conclusions, which are as follows:
- 1) mental intentional states and speech acts represent the external world, represent it in terms of their feasibility, which is why both have logical properties.
- 2) intentional states are conditions for the sincerity of a speech act.
Thus, the condition for the feasibility of a speech act is both the external world and the intentional mental states of the communicants. By itself, a mental state is not an action. Action becomes a speech act.
It would seem that everything here is simple and clear: everyone knows about the possibility of expressing their mental states in the language, about the communicative significance of speech. But the philosophical thoughts of analysts are far from ordinary: in speech acts, a person not only expresses his inner world, but acts. And it is in this action, its analysis, that one should look for the key to most philosophical problems. As a result, the concept of a speech act turns out to be central to any philosophical discussion. Orientation to speech acts gives philosophy the necessary concreteness, saving it both from naturalism, when the specifics of a person are forgotten, and from subjectivism with its passion for mentality, which is often absolutized without proper reason.
SPEECH ACT, the minimum unit of speech activity, singled out and studied in the theory of speech acts - a doctrine that is the most important part of linguistic pragmatics.
Since a speech act is a type of action, its analysis uses essentially the same categories that are necessary to characterize and evaluate any action: subject, goal, method, tool, means, result, conditions, success, etc.
P. The subject of the speech act - the speaker makes an utterance, as a rule, calculated on the perception of it by the addressee - the listener. The utterance acts both as a product of a speech act and as a tool for achieving a specific goal. Depending on the circumstances or conditions in which a speech act takes place, it can either achieve its goal and thus be successful, or not achieve it. To be successful, a speech act must at least be appropriate. Otherwise, the speaker will face a communicative failure, or a communicative failure.
The conditions that must be met in order for a speech act to be recognized as appropriate are called the conditions for the success of a speech act.
In a speech act, J. Austin distinguishes three levels, also called acts: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts.
A locutionary act (locution, from the English locution ‘turn of speech, speech’) is the pronunciation of a statement that has phonetic, lexico-grammatical and semantic structures. It has meaning. The realization of the sound structure falls to the share of the phonetic act, the lexico-grammatical structure is realized in the phatic act, and the semantic structure in the rhetic act.
The illocutionary act (illocution, lat. il- Perlocutionary act (perlocution, lat. per- ‘through’) serves to deliberately influence the addressee, to achieve some result. This act is not conventional.
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More on the topic 18. The concept of a speech act. Typology of speech acts.:
- 13. Lexico-phraseological norms of the modern Russian literary language. Lexicology as a branch of linguistics. The main categories of the section. Typology of lexical errors. Logical errors in speech (alogisms). Speech redundancy (pleonasm, tautology). Speech deficiency.
- 18. Ethical aspect of the culture of speech. Speech etiquette and communication culture. Formulas of speech etiquette. Etiquette formulas of acquaintance, introduction, greeting and farewell. "You" and "You" as forms of address in Russian speech etiquette. National features of speech etiquette.
I. INTRODUCTION
In a typical speech situation, including the speaker, the listener, and the speaker's utterance, the most diverse types of acts are associated with the utterance. When speaking, the speaker sets the speech apparatus in motion, pronounces sounds. At the same time, he performs other acts: informing listeners or causing them irritation or boredom. He also performs acts consisting in mentioning certain persons, places, etc. In addition, he expresses a statement or asks a question, gives a command or reports, congratulates or warns, that is, performs an act from among those that Austin (see . Austin 1962) called illocutionary. It is this kind of act that is considered in this work, and it could be called “What is an illocutionary act?”. I am not attempting to define the term "illocutionary act," but if I can give a correct analysis of an individual illocutionary act, that analysis may form the basis of such a definition. Examples of English verbs and verb phrases associated with illocutionary acts are: state “state, state, assert, assert” assert, declare, describe “describe”, warn “warn”, remark “notice”, comment “comment”, command “command”, order “order”, request “ask”, criticize “criticize”, apologize “apologize”, censure “condemn”, approve “approve”, welcome “greet”, promise “promise”, express approval “express approval” and express regret. Austin claimed that there are more than a thousand such expressions in the English language.
By way of introduction, it would probably make sense to explain why I think the study of speech acts (or, as they are sometimes called, linguistic or linguistic acts) is of interest and important to the philosophy of language. I think that the essential feature of any kind of linguistic communication is that it involves a linguistic act. Contrary to popular belief, the basic unit of linguistic communication is not a symbol, not a word, not a sentence, and not even a specific instance of a symbol, word or sentence, but the production of this specific instance in the course of a speech act. More precisely, the production of a particular sentence under certain conditions is an illocutionary act, and an illocutionary act is the smallest unit of linguistic communication.
I do not know how to prove that acts are the essence of linguistic communication, but I can give arguments by which one can try to convince those who are skeptical. As a first argument, the skeptic's attention should be drawn to the fact that if he perceives a certain sound or icon on paper as a manifestation of linguistic communication (as a message), then one of the factors that determine such a perception of it is that he should consider this a sound or icon as a result of the activity of a being with certain intentions. He cannot regard it simply as a natural phenomenon, like a rock, a waterfall, or a tree. To consider it as a manifestation of linguistic communication, we must assume that its production is what I call a speech act. So, for example, the logical premise of the current attempts to decipher Mayan hieroglyphs is the hypothesis that the signs that we see on the stones were produced by creatures more or less like us, and produced with certain ones. intentions. If we were sure that these icons appeared due to erosion, then no one would have thought to decipher them or even call them hieroglyphs. Bringing them under the category of linguistic communication necessarily entails an understanding of their production as the performance of speech acts.
The performance of an illocutionary act is one of those forms of behavior that are regulated by rules. I will try to show that actions such as asking questions or making statements are governed by rules in the same way that a base stroke in baseball or a knight in chess are governed by rules. I want, therefore, to explicate the notion of an illocutionary act by giving a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the performance of some particular kind of illocutionary act, and by extracting from it a set of semantic rules for the use of that expression (or syntactic device) which marks the utterance as an illocutionary act of that particular kind. If I can formulate such conditions and the rules corresponding to them for at least one kind of illocutionary act, then we will have at our disposal a model for the analysis of other kinds of acts and, therefore, for the explication of this concept in general. But in order to prepare the ground for formulating such conditions and deriving from them rules for the performance of an illocutionary act, I must discuss three more initial concepts: rules, judgments, and meaning. I will confine my discussion of these concepts to those aspects that are essential for the purposes of this study, and yet, in order to give any complete account of all that I would like to say about each of these concepts, three separate works would be required. However, sometimes it is worth sacrificing depth for the sake of breadth, and therefore I will be very brief.
II. REGULATIONS
In recent years, the concept of rules for the use of expressions has been repeatedly discussed in the philosophy of language. Some philosophers have even said that knowing the meaning of a word is simply knowing the rules for its use or usage. What is alarming about such discussions is that no philosopher, to my knowledge, has ever proposed anything that comes close to an adequate formulation of the rules for the use of even one expression. If meaning is reduced to rules of use, then we must be able to formulate rules for the use of expressions in such a way that the meaning of these expressions is explicated. Other philosophers, perhaps horrified by the inability of their colleagues to propose any rules, have rejected the fashionable view that meaning is reduced to rules, and have declared that there are no such semantic rules at all. I am inclined to think that their skepticism is premature and that its source lies in the inability to distinguish between different types of rules. I'll try to explain what I mean.
I make a distinction between two kinds of rules. Some rules regulate forms of behavior that existed before them; for example, the rules of etiquette govern interpersonal relationships, but these relationships exist independently of the rules of etiquette. Other rules do not just regulate, but create or define new forms of behavior. Football rules, for example, do not just govern the game of football, but, so to speak, create the very possibility of such activity or determine it. The activity called playing football consists in carrying out actions in accordance with these rules; football outside these rules does not exist. Let us call the rules of the second type constitutive, and the first type regulative. Regulatory rules regulate activities that existed before them - activities whose existence is logically independent of the existence of rules. Constitutive rules create (and also regulate) activities whose existence is logically dependent on these rules.
Regulations are usually in the form of an imperative or have an imperative paraphrase, such as "When using a knife at meals, hold it in your right hand" or "Officers must wear ties at dinner." Some constitutive rules take quite a different form, for example, the king is checkmated if he is attacked in such a way that no move can get him out of the attack; A goal in rugby is scored when a player crosses the opponent's goal line while holding the ball. If imperative regulative rules are for us the model of rules, then non-mandatory constitutive rules of this kind will probably seem extremely strange and even bear little resemblance to rules in general. Note that they are almost tautological in nature, for such a "rule" already seems to provide a partial definition of "checkmate" or "goal." But of course, the quasi-tautological character is an inevitable consequence of them as constitutive rules: the rules concerning goals must define the concept of "goal" in the same way that the rules concerning football define "football". That, for example, in rugby a goal can be counted under such and such conditions and is worth six points, may appear as a rule in some cases, as an analytical truth in others; and this possibility of interpreting a rule as a tautology is a sign by which a given rule can be classified as constitutive. Regulatory rules are usually of the form "Do X" or "If Y then do X". Some representatives of the class of constitutive rules have the same form, but along with this there are those that have the form “X is considered Y-th”.
Failure to understand this has important implications for philosophy. So, for example, some philosophers ask the question: “How can a promise give rise to an obligation?” A similar question would be: “How can a goal generate six points?” Both of these questions can be answered only by formulating a rule of the form "X is considered Y-th."
I am inclined to think that the failure of some philosophers to formulate rules for the use of expressions, and the skepticism of other philosophers about the very possibility of such rules, stems at least in part from a failure to distinguish between constitutive and regulative rules. The model, or model, of a rule for most philosophers is the regulative rule, but if we look in semantics for purely regulative rules, we are unlikely to find anything interesting from the point of view of logical analysis. Undoubtedly, there are rules of communication (social rules) of the form “One should not speak obscenities at official meetings”, but such rules hardly play a decisive role in the explication of the semantics of the language. The hypothesis on which this work is based is that the semantics of a language can be seen as a set of constitutive rule systems, and that illocutionary acts are acts performed in accordance with these sets of constitutive rules. One of the goals of this work is to formulate a set of constitutive rules for one kind of speech act. And if what I have said about constitutive rules is true, we should not be surprised that not all of these rules will take the form of an imperative. Indeed, we shall see that these rules fall into several different categories, none of which are entirely identical with the rules of etiquette. An attempt to formulate rules for an illocutionary act can also be seen as a kind of test of the hypothesis that speech acts are based on constitutive rules. If we fail to give satisfactory formulations of the rules, our failure may be interpreted as evidence against the hypothesis, a partial refutation of it.
Since a speech act is a type of action, its analysis uses essentially the same categories that are necessary to characterize and evaluate any action: subject, goal, method, tool, means, result, conditions, success, etc. The subject of the speech act, the speaker, makes an utterance, as a rule, designed for the perception of it by the addressee, the listener. The utterance acts both as a product of a speech act and as a tool for achieving a specific goal. Depending on the circumstances or conditions in which a speech act takes place, it can either achieve its goal and thus be successful, or not achieve it. To be successful, a speech act must at least be appropriate. Otherwise, the speaker will face a communicative failure, or a communicative failure.
The conditions that must be met in order for a speech act to be recognized as appropriate are called the conditions for the success of a speech act. For example, if a mother says to her son: Sit down for lessons!, then she thereby performs a speech act, the purpose of which is to induce the addressee to perform the action indicated in the statement used to achieve this goal. If the lessons have not yet been done, if the son is able to do them, and if this is not a duty that he usually performs without any reminders, then this speech act is recognized as appropriate, and in this, communicative, sense, successful. If at least one of the above conditions is not met (the lessons have already been done, or the son is in bed with a high temperature, or he himself, as usual, was going to sit down for lessons), the appropriateness of the mother’s speech act may be called into question, and because of this he may be a communication failure. But even if all the conditions that ensure the relevance of the speech act are met, the result to which it will lead may or may not correspond to the goal set by the speaker. So, in our example, the result of the mother's speech act can be both the consent of the son to perform the indicated action, and the refusal to perform it. At the same time, the refusal can be both motivated (for example, by the desire to watch your favorite TV show or the fact that there are no lessons) or unmotivated.
So, the speech act is a rather complicated phenomenon. The theory of speech acts distinguishes three levels, or aspects of the analysis of a speech act. First, a speech act can be viewed as actually saying something. Considered in this aspect, the speech act acts as a locutionary act (from the Latin locutio"speaking"). The locutionary act, in turn, is a complex structure, since it includes both the pronunciation of sounds (the act of phonation), and the use of words, and their linking according to the rules of grammar, and the designation of certain objects with their help (the act of reference), and attributing certain properties and relations to these objects (the act of predication). Linguistics has for a long time been focused on the study of the locutionary aspect of the speech act. Considering statements regardless of the communicative situation in which they were used, phonetics described their sound side, lexicology - their vocabulary, syntax - the rules for connecting words in a sentence, semantics gave this sentence an interpretation, reducing it to the objective, i.e. devoid of truth value, the content of the judgment expressed by the sentence, in other words, to the propositional content, or proposition, expressed by the sentence.
However, a person, as a rule, does not speak for the sake of the process of speaking: not in order to enjoy the sounds of his own voice, not in order to make a sentence out of words, and not even just in order to mention some objects in the sentence and attribute them to certain properties, thereby reflecting some state of affairs in the world. In the process of speaking (in Latin in locutio) a person simultaneously performs some action that has some extralinguistic purpose: he asks or answers, informs, assures or warns, appoints someone to someone, criticizes someone for something, etc. A speech act, considered from the point of view of its extralinguistic purpose, acts as an illocutionary act. Integral, i.e. a generalized and integral characteristic of an utterance as a means of carrying out an illocutionary act is called the illocutionary function, or illocutionary power of the utterance.
Dissecting the content of the utterance at the illocutionary level of the analysis of the speech act, two main components are distinguished in this content: the illocutionary function (F) and the proposition (P), generally representing it as a formula F(P). Thus, the content of the statement in the example considered above is decomposed into the propositional part "you sit down for lessons" (with the affirmativeness removed, i.e. without the truth assessment) and the illocutionary function "inducement". Question expressed with a sentence You sit down for lessons?, has the same propositional content, but a different illocutionary function - the function of a question; the meaning of the statement I promise to sit down for lessons in a typical situation, its use consists of the proposition "I will sit down for lessons" and the illocutionary function "promise"; the meaning of the statement He promises to sit down for lessons in a typical situation, its use consists of the proposition "he promises to sit down for lessons" and the illocutionary function "message".
Finally, through speaking (in Latin per locutio) a person achieves certain results by making certain changes in the reality around him, in particular, and above all, in the mind of his interlocutor, and the resulting result of a speech action may or may not correspond to the non-speech goal for which it was intended by the speaker. The speech act, considered in the aspect of its real consequences, acts as a perlocutionary act. So, in our example, the mother’s statement could, for example, distract the son from the computer game and for this reason cause him dissatisfaction or surprise him (if the mother had already checked the lessons he had learned, but managed to forget about it out of absent-mindedness), or in some other way affect his psyche. The perlocutionary act and the corresponding concept of the perlocutionary effect is that aspect of speech activity that rhetoric has long been engaged in, studying the optimal ways of influencing speech on the thoughts and feelings of the audience.
Thus, the main novelty of the three-level scheme of analysis of speech action described above, proposed by the English philosopher and logician J. Austin, is the concept of an illocutionary act and the corresponding semantic concept of an illocutionary function (force), since they reflect such aspects of the act of speech and the content of the utterance that are not received an adequate description neither in traditional linguistics nor in classical rhetoric. Naturally, it is this aspect of the speech act that is given the main attention in the theory of speech acts.
J. Austin, who laid the foundations of the theory of speech acts in his lectures of the second half of the 1950s (they were published posthumously in the form of a book How to Do Things with Words in 1962, Russian. per. came out in 1986 under the title Word as action in the 17th issue of the publication New in foreign linguistics), did not give the concept of an illocutionary act a precise definition. He only gave characteristic examples of such acts - question, answer, informing, assurance, warning, appointment, criticism, etc., noting that each language has its own nomenclature of such actions. Later, in the theory of speech acts, the distinctive features of the illocutionary act were revealed: it differs from the locutionary act on the basis of intentionality, i.e. connection with a specific goal, intention, and it is opposed to a perlocutionary act on the basis of conventionality, i.e. by the presence of certain rules, the action in accordance with which automatically ensures the successful implementation of this illocutionary act by the speaker. Some of these rules are the rules of the language: in the languages of the world there are special formal means that directly or indirectly indicate the illocutionary function of a speech act.
First of all, there is a special class of sentences that directly expresses the illocutionary function of the utterance that is produced with their help. These are the so-called performative sentences. The basis of the lexico-semantic structure of these sentences is the so-called illocutionary verb, i.e. a verb belonging to a subclass of speaking verbs and containing components in its lexical meaning, indicating the purpose of speaking and certain conditions for the implementation of a speech action, for example ask, congratulate, assure, promise etc. However, the presence of an illocutionary verb is not a sufficient condition for a sentence to be performative. For this, it is also necessary that the illocutionary verb be used not to describe a certain situation, but in order to clarify what speech act the speaker performs when using this sentence. In other words, the illocutionary verb must be used performatively (and not descriptively).
The semantic specificity of a performative sentence, its difference from an ordinary declarative sentence, is that an ordinary declarative sentence is used to represent a certain state of affairs, i.e. for the purpose of describing, reporting, asserting, etc., and the performative sentence serves not to describe the action that the speaker performs, but to explication what kind of action he performs. The referent of an ordinary declarative sentence, for example I draw you, is some situation that exists independently of the speech act, and the referent of the performative sentence I salute you in its normal use is the very speech act of its use. In short, a performative utterance has the property of self-referentiality. An ordinary declarative sentence, when used, becomes a statement that can be evaluated as true or false, while performative sentences in the typical context of their use cannot be applied to this kind of evaluation. So, we can say that the proposal I draw you will be, depending on the real state of affairs in the world of discourse, either true or false (cf. possible reactions - Yes this is true or No, it's not: you don't draw, you just draw with a pencil on paper / you don't draw me at all), but we cannot say the same about the sentence I salute you. In the normal case of using such a sentence, the question of the truth or falsity of the words of the speaker does not arise. The corresponding statement can only be evaluated as appropriate or inappropriate, but not as true or false. In this regard, one also speaks of the self-verification of performative sentences, i.e. their truth by virtue of the very fact of their use.
The classical form of a performative sentence has a subject expressed by the personal pronoun of the first person singular, and a predicate agreed with it in the form of the indicative mood of the present tense of the active voice. For example, ( I)I promise you will get better. However, Austin pointed out that performative use is not the exclusive privilege of the sentence model with the verb-predicate in the named form. For the Russian language, the following form can be added to the above form, which differ from it in any of the grammatical categories included in its description: (1) a person can be not only the first, but also the third, for example, in the text of an official message, the verb is in the third person thank you used performatively: Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Russian Federation and M.P. Ivanov thanks for the invitation…; (2) the number may be plural; (3) time can be future Let me remind youyou that the subscription period ends tomorrow; (4) pledge can be passive You are appointed as my deputy; (5) mood can be subjunctive I would advise you to stay. In addition, for the performative use of a verb, it is not even necessary that it be the syntactic vertex (predicate) of the sentence, cf.: I would like to give thanks advocated nice words. I hasten to congratulate you on the birth of your son etc.
In the two properties of an illocutionary act - intentionality and conventionality - lies the contradiction inherent in a speech act between two moments inextricably linked in it: subjective (the goal of the speaker) and objective (independent of the speaker, ways to ensure recognition of this goal by the listener).
So, the main feature of an illocutionary act is its purpose. This does not mean any goal, for the achievement of which we perform a speech act, but only one that, in accordance with our intention, should be recognized by the addressee. Only such a goal, open for recognition, is called illocutionary, and, in principle, it may not coincide with the true goal of the speaker. So, wanting to send an annoying guest out and knowing that he is at odds with NN and is unlikely to want to meet him, the host can say: Yesterday I called NN and said that he would come in today around nine. The true goal of the speaker - to induce the listener to leave - cannot be considered as the illocutionary goal of his speech act, because it is hidden and it is not at all necessary (and in some cases undesirable) for the addressee to recognize it in order to achieve it. The illocutionary purpose of the speech act in this case will be the purpose of providing the addressee with some information. This goal, and in this case only it, is presented openly to be identified as such. Therefore, this speech act at the illocutionary level of analysis will be considered as a message, not an impulse.
Illocutionary acts differ not only in their purpose, but also in a number of other ways. The most famous universal classification of illocutionary acts was built by the American logician and philosopher J. Searle (b. 1932). The basis of this classification is a group of features, which the author himself calls "directions of differences between illocutionary acts." The most significant of them are:
purpose (for example, for a message - to reflect the state of affairs in the world, for an order - to induce the addressee to act, for a promise - to make a commitment, for congratulations - to express a certain emotion of the speaker);
the direction of the correspondence between the statement and reality (for example, in the case of a message, the statement is brought into line with reality, in the case of an order, on the contrary, reality must be brought into line with the statement);
the internal state of the speaker (for example, when affirming, he has an appropriate opinion, when promising, intentions, when asking, desires, when giving thanks, a feeling of gratitude);
features of the propositional content of a speech act (for example, in a prediction, the content of a proposition refers to the future tense, and in a report, to the present or past; in a promise, the subject of the proposition is the speaker, and in the request, the listener);
the connection of a speech act with extralinguistic institutions or institutions (for example, the speech act of appointing someone as one’s deputy, usually drawn up in the form of a document, implies the existence of some organization within which the speaker must be endowed with appropriate powers, part of which he, with the help of this speech act, gives other member of this organization, compare with similar goals, but institutionally not regulated cases when we ask someone to replace us - to act as our "deputy" - in some unofficial role: to visit our relative in the hospital instead of us, to go instead of us at a parent meeting at school, etc.)
Given these parameters, the entire set of illocutionary acts was divided by Searle into five main classes.
The representatives, oriented from reality to the statement, aim to reflect the state of affairs in the world, assume that the speaker has an appropriate opinion, and their propositional content is not limited in any way. Representative examples: message (cf. Chemistry exam scheduled for June 2), condemnation (cf. you're doing wrong), forecasting (cf. This conflict will escalate into a full-scale war), qualifications (cf. Such actions are a gross violation of the charter.), recognition (cf. I've been deceiving you all this time), description (cf. The house is located on top of a hill and is surrounded by a magnificent garden).
Directives, with orientation from the statement to reality, aim to induce the addressee to do / not to do something, assume that the speaker has a corresponding desire, and their propositional content always consists in the fact that the addressee will / will not perform some action in the future. This class includes requests, prohibitions, advice, instructions, appeals and other types of incentive speech acts.
Commissives, oriented, like directives, from the statement to reality, are used by the speaker in order to bind himself with an obligation to do / not do something, suggest that he has a corresponding intention, and their proposition always has the speaker as its subject. Examples of commissions: promise, oath, guarantee.
Expressives aim to express a certain psychological state of the speaker (feeling of gratitude, regret, joy, etc.) as a reaction to the state of affairs defined within the framework of the proposition. The direction of correspondence between utterance and reality is not essential for them, since the state of affairs that serves as a reason for the expressive (what we congratulate, for which we thank or apologize, etc.) is not the main content, but the premise of such a speech act - his presupposition. The propositional content of the expressive ascribes some predicate to the subject, which can be either the speaker (for example, when we say Sorry for being late!, then we are talking about our own lateness), or the listener (for example, when we say Thank you very much for your help!, then we mean the action performed by the addressee of the statement). Expressives are especially characterized by phraseologized ( cm. PHRASEOLOGY) means of expression - speech clichés specific to each language, cf. Russian Sorry! - the imperative form of the verb excuse(or not recommended by the rules of speech etiquette I'm sorry! - the form of the indicative mood of the reflexive verb apologize) with its English equivalent Sorry!, in form - an adjective with the meaning "distressed", or English Thanks(lit. "thank you") and the functionally equivalent Russian idiom Thanks, etymologically ascending to the wish “God save [you/you]!”.
The fifth illocutionary class - declarations - differs from the other four in terms of connection with extralinguistic institutions and the specificity of the correspondence between the statement and reality arising from this fact: by declaring (declaring) a certain state of affairs as existing, the speech act of the declaration thereby makes it exist in the real world. Examples of declarations are appointment to a post, declaration of war or truce, excommunication, knighting, admission to a party, giving a title to a person or name to an institution, etc.
This classification, like most other classifications of linguistic phenomena, does not divide the set into non-overlapping classes. There are speech acts that have features characteristic of different illocutionary classes and form, so to speak, "mixed" types. For example, an invitation is both a directive, since the speaker encourages the addressee to come to a certain place, and a commission, since the speaker thereby binds himself, either personally or through other persons, to ensure that the invitee is properly received. A complaint (for example, a girl’s complaint to a teacher about a classmate pulling her pigtails) is both representative, since it reflects some state of affairs in reality, and expressive, since it expresses the speaker’s dissatisfaction with this situation, and a directive, since the purpose of the complaint is not just to inform the addressee, but encourage him to take appropriate action.
Within the five main illocutionary classes, speech acts differ in a number of additional parameters:
the relationship of the speech act with the preceding text (for example, both the answer and the statement are representative, but the answer, unlike the statement, presupposes the question that precedes it);
the ratio of the social statuses of the communicants (for example, an order and a demand are directives, but when ordering, the status of the speaker must be higher than the status of the listener, and when demanding this is not necessary, and therefore we can demand from our boss that he be polite to us, but we cannot order him to do so);
a way of connecting a speech act with the interests of the speaker and the listener (for example, congratulations and condolences are expressives that differ from each other not only in the expressed feeling of joy and sadness, respectively, but also in that the event that is congratulated is considered as a benefit for the listener, and the event , about which they condole - as a grief that befell him);
the degree of intensity of the representation of the illocutionary goal (for example, a request and a prayer, which are equally directives, differ from each other primarily in this parameter).
Reflecting on what can distinguish one illocutionary act from another, we come to the conclusion that the illocutionary function of an utterance can theoretically be represented as a bundle of specific sign values, similar to the above, and these values themselves correlate with the conditions for the success of a speech act with a given illocutionary function. The variety of distinguishing features of illocutionary acts is reflected in the division of the conditions for the success of speech acts into four types: (1) conditions of propositional content, (2) preparatory or preliminary conditions, (3) conditions of sincerity, (4) essential condition, or condition of destination. Conditions of the first type are restrictions on the propositional content of the used statement. The essential condition corresponds to the illocutionary goal - the goal that the speaker seeks to convey to the mind of the listener with the help of his statement. The preparatory conditions reflect the objective and subjective premises that are compatible with the setting of a given illocutionary goal, i.e. circumstances of a speech act, in the absence of which it will fail communicatively. Sincerity conditions reflect the internal (psychological) state that can be attributed to the speaker, based on the assumption of the sincerity and seriousness of this speech act. (Thus, preparatory conditions and conditions of sincerity of a speech act form one of the types of implicit information conveyed by an utterance, along with consequences and presuppositions.) communicative failure, although the falsity, falsity of this speech act can be exposed in the future. As an example, below is a system of conditions for the success of a speech act of a promise, carried out with the help of some statement by T.
Conditions for the success of the speech act of a promise.
1. Condition of propositional content:
Saying T, G expresses the idea that he will perform the action D in the future.
2. Preparatory conditions:
a) D is able to do D;
b) C would rather Speaker do action D than not do it, and D is convinced that this is the case;
c) Neither D nor C considers that Speaker's action D is taken for granted.
3. Condition of sincerity:
G intends to do D.
4. Essential condition:
D intends by saying T to bind himself to commit D.
The inseparable connection between the illocutionary function of a speech act and the conditions for its success allows the addressee of the speech act to correctly recognize its illocutionary function even when some of its essential features do not have special formal indicators in the language structure of the used statement: the missing information is extracted from the circumstances of the communicative situation. So, about that saying Make a work plan for the next quarter refers to the type of incentives (directives), we are told by the grammatical form of the imperative mood of the verb, but nothing in the linguistic form of this statement, including intonation, tells us whether this is an order or a request. But if at the same time we know that the speaker is the boss, and the listener is his subordinate, we will understand that this is an order, since the control of the speaker over the addressee (and precisely in the field of activity to which the propositional content of the statement belongs) is one of the conditions for success. order, but contradicts the success condition for requests.
On the same connection between the illocutionary function of an utterance and the conditions for its success, the understanding of indirect speech acts is also based - speech actions carried out with the help of statements that have in their structure a clear indicator of one illocutionary function, but at the same time, their illocutionary function is normally different. Examples of indirect speech acts are polite requests "disguised" as interrogative sentences ( You ?), or statements that again have the form of questions (the so-called rhetorical questions).
The opinion was expressed that indirect speech acts should be considered as a manifestation of linguistic polysemy ( cm. POLYSEMY), i.e., for example, to consider that in Russian an interrogative construction with negation is a formal indicator not only of the illocutionary function of a question, but also of the illocutionary function of a polite request. Searle, challenging this point of view in his article Indirect speech acts, revealed the mechanism of indirect expression of the speaker's intention. Resorting for one reason or another (for example, out of politeness or for a deeper impact on the addressee) to an indirect way of expressing his illocutionary goal, the speaker counts not only on the interlocutor's linguistic knowledge (and thus on knowledge of the formal indicators of the illocutionary function), but also on his ability to reason on the basis of a variety of non-linguistic knowledge: knowledge of the conditions for the success of speech acts, principles of communication such as the maxims of P. Grice's cooperative dialogue, and, finally, knowledge about the world, often also called "encyclopedic", although these two terms may differ. Yes, interrogative You could you leave me that book for another week?, generally speaking, can be used for its intended purpose, i.e. with the illocutionary function of the question (for example, in an abstract discussion of the limits of the possibilities available to the librarian), but in a typical communicative situation that excludes irrelevant abstract rantings, the addressee will understand this question as a request, knowing that the opportunity for him to perform an action is a necessary condition for success the speech act of the request and that by asking such a question, the speaker actually expresses exactly the corresponding request.
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