Speech act

Categories: Pragmatics | Philosophy of language | Oral communication

A speech act is best described as "in saying something, we do something," such as when a minister says, "I now pronounce you husband and wife," or an action performed by means of language, such as describing something ("It is snowing."), asking a question ("Is it snowing?"), making a request or order ("Could you pass the salt?", "Drop your weapon or I'll shoot you!"), or making a promise ("I promise I'll give it back."). Other common examples of speech acts include greeting, apologizing or insulting.

For much of the history of linguistics and the philosophy of language, language was viewed primarily as a way of making factual assertions, and the other uses of language tended to be ignored. However, the acclaimed work of J. L. Austin led philosophers to pay more attention to the way in which language is used in everyday activities. His student John Searle further developed this approach. Yet, the first systematic and comprehensive work on speech acts had already been done long before by the phenomenologist Adolf Reinach in 1913.

Austin distinguishes between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts. An interesting type of illocutionary speech act is that of performatives, which are expressions such as "I nominate John to be President.", "I sentence you to ten years imprisonment." or "I promise to pay you back.". In these expressions, the action that the sentence describes (nominating, sentencing, promising) is performed by the sentence itself; the speech is the act it effects (unlike in so-called constantives that only carry a piece of information). In contrast, perlocutionary speech acts cause actions that are not the same as the speech.

The study of speech acts forms part of the discipline of pragmatics, which forms part of linguistics.

In philosophy, especially in ethics and philosophy of law, speech act theory is related to the study of norms.

Speech Act Theory has also been very influential in computer science over the last two decades, particularly in the design of artificial languages for communication between software entities ("agents" or "softbots"). Speech act theory was used, for example, to give a semantics to the agent language called Agent Communications Language (ACL) developed by the standards body, the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) [1]. This semantics built on the work of Phil Cohen, Hector Levesque and David Sadek, among others. The FIPA ACL speech act semantics, expressed semi-formally using epistemic modal logic, defines utterances in ACL in terms of the certain beliefs, uncertain beliefs, desires and intentions of the speaker. In principle, therefore, it enables agents using FIPA ACL to be sure that other agents will understand the meaning of utterances in the same way as the speaker. However, the FIPA ACL language syntax and semantics, although now widely used in agent systems, have been heavily criticized on theoretical and practical grounds.de:Sprechakttheorie fr:Acte de langage no:Talehandling pl:Akt mowy sv:Talakt