Austin's Speech Act Theory
Before Austin, most philosophers treated language as a tool for describing the world. Austin flipped this idea: he argued that speaking isn't just about stating facts, but about doing things. When a judge says "I sentence you to five years," that sentence isn't true or false. It is the act of sentencing. This insight is the foundation of speech act theory.
Constative vs. Performative Utterances
Austin's starting point was a distinction between two types of utterances.
Constative utterances describe or report states of affairs. They can be evaluated as true or false.
"The Earth revolves around the Sun." → This is either true or false.
Performative utterances don't describe anything. They perform an action just by being spoken. You can't call them true or false; they either succeed or they don't.
"I hereby declare this meeting adjourned." → Saying this is the act of adjourning the meeting.
Other classic examples of performatives: a minister pronouncing a couple married, a dignitary naming a ship, or someone saying "I promise to pay you back." In each case, saying the words constitutes doing the action.
Austin eventually realized this clean split was harder to maintain than it first appeared. Many utterances blur the line. That's part of what led him to develop the three-act framework below.
Components of Speech Acts
Austin proposed that every utterance involves up to three acts happening simultaneously.
Locutionary Act
The locutionary act is the act of producing a meaningful sentence. Austin broke it into three sub-acts:
- Phonetic act: physically producing sounds
- Phatic act: producing recognizable words arranged in a grammatical structure
- Rhetic act: using those words to express a particular meaning (reference and sense)
Think of the locutionary act as what you literally said.
Illocutionary Act
The illocutionary act is what you're doing by saying those words: stating, questioning, commanding, promising, warning, and so on. This is where illocutionary force comes in.
Illocutionary force is the intended purpose behind an utterance. The same sentence can carry different illocutionary forces depending on context:
- "I'll be there" spoken to a friend → a promise
- "I'll be there" spoken as a threat to a rival → a warning
Similarly, "Can you pass the salt?" has the grammatical form of a question, but its illocutionary force is a request. The illocutionary act is the core of what speech act theory cares about most.
Perlocutionary Act
The perlocutionary act is the effect the utterance has on the listener: their thoughts, feelings, or actions. This is what happens as a result of the speech act.
- A warning might frighten someone.
- An argument might persuade someone.
- A joke might amuse someone.
The perlocutionary effect isn't always what the speaker intended. You might try to persuade and end up annoying your listener instead.
Quick comparison: The locutionary act = the words you say. The illocutionary act = what you mean to do by saying them. The perlocutionary act = what actually happens to the listener.
Felicity Conditions
Since performative utterances can't be true or false, Austin asked: what makes them succeed or fail? His answer was felicity conditions, the conditions that must be met for a speech act to come off successfully.
- Preparatory conditions: The speaker must have the authority or standing to perform the act. (A random person can't sentence someone to prison; only a judge can.)
- Sincerity conditions: The speaker genuinely intends what they say. (If you say "I promise" with no intention of following through, the promise is defective.)
- Essential conditions: The utterance counts as performing the act by convention. (Saying "I do" during a wedding ceremony counts as accepting marriage; saying it while watching TV does not.)
When these conditions aren't met, the speech act misfires or is abused. Austin called these failures infelicities.
Indirect Speech Acts
Sometimes the literal meaning of an utterance doesn't match its intended illocutionary force. These are indirect speech acts, and they rely on context and shared knowledge for interpretation.
- "It's cold in here" is literally a statement about temperature, but in context it can function as a request to close the window or turn up the heat.
- "Do you have the time?" is grammatically a yes/no question, but everyone understands it as a request to be told the time.
Indirect speech acts show why illocutionary force can't be read off sentence structure alone. Context, tone, and shared assumptions all play a role in determining what action an utterance performs.