Illocutionary Acts, Institutional Speech, and Metaphor
Illocutionary Act of Communication
As an act of communication, a speech act succeeds if the audience identifies the attitude being expressed, in accordance with the speaker’s intention. Thus, in classifying the types of speech acts of communication, we have to spell out the correlation between the type of illocutionary act and the type of expressed attitude.
Institutional Speech Acts
Institutional speech acts have the function of affecting institutional states of affairs. They can do so in either of two ways:
- Officially judging something to be the case (e.g., judges’ rulings, referees’ calls)
- Actually making something the case (e.g., sentencing, bequeathing, appointing, marrying)
The success of institutional acts does not depend solely on the recognition of the attitude. They can be performed only in certain ways, under certain circumstances, by those in certain institutional or social positions.
Felicity Conditions
It is possible for an act to be infelicitous if it violates the rules governing speech acts. The contextual and intentional requirements for the felicity of a speech act are called the felicity conditions for that act.
For example, felicity conditions for an act of promising:
- The propositional content rule: The utterance must predicate some future act A of the speaker.
- First preparatory rule: H would like S to do A, and S knows this.
- Second preparatory rule: It is not obvious to both S and H that S will do A in the normal course of events.
- Sincerity rule: S must intend to do A.
- Constitutive rule: The utterance of P (promise) counts as S’s taking on an obligation to do A.
Metaphor
A primary pragmatic process of transfer (mapping) from the source domain to the target domain is demanded so that we can construct a provisional meaning.
The domains represent the conventional conceptions of the two concepts that we detect in the conceptual contrast.
In interpreting (2), the hearer applies a mapping, M, from the source domain, CAT, to the target domain, INFANT.
Domains:
- A set of terms which make up its vocabulary
- A set of structural constraints which specify how these terms are related to the information associated with the concept.
To interpret (2), we may coherently transform a set of sentences from the source domain, cat, to sentences with terms only of the target domain, infant, and this set of transformed sentences will re-describe the concept INFANT through the concept CAT.
The mapping generates a metaphorically restructured target domain, a conception of infants provisionally modified by those aspects of the concept CAT that influence its restructuring.
From this context of interpretation, the meaning of ‘cat’ in (2) is the meaning that this term has in the metaphorically restructured target domain INFANT’; the information that can describe INFANTS coherently when they are seen as bearing the features typical of cats: ………………………………………………………………….
‘Cat’ acquires a transferred, metaphoric, provisional meaning. Now, ‘my cat’ in (2) denotes Marian’s son.