Speech Act Theory: Performatives, Felicity Conditions, and Meaning
The Three Traditional Assumptions About Language
- The basic sentence type in language is declarative (i.e., a statement or assertion).
- The principal use of language is to describe states of affairs (by using statements).
- The meaning of utterances can be described in terms of their truth or falsity.
Performative Utterance
To define performatives, Austin refers to those sentences which conform to the old prejudice in that they are used to describe or constate something, and which thus are true or false; and he calls such sentences “constatives”. In contrast to them, Austin defines “performatives”.
For example, when Paul says “I promise to do the dishes” in an appropriate context, then he thereby does not just say something, and in particular, he does not describe what he is doing; rather, in making the utterance, he performs the promise; since promising is an illocutionary act, the utterance is thus a performative utterance. If Peter utters the sentence without the intention to keep the promise, or if eventually he does not keep it, then although something is not in order with the utterance, the problem is not that the sentence is false: it is rather “unhappy”, or “infelicitous”, as Austin also says in his discussion of so-called felicity conditions. In the absence of any such flaw, on the other hand, the utterance is to be assessed as “happy” or “felicitous”, rather than as “true”. Austin dropped this distinction in favor of a distinction between explicit performatives (“I promise it will never happen again”) and primary or implicit performatives (“It will never happen again,” functioning as a promise).
Felicitous and Infelicitous
In J. L. Austin’s formulation of speech act theory, a performative utterance is neither true nor false, but can instead be deemed “felicitous” or “infelicitous” according to a set of conditions whose interpretation differs depending on whether the utterance in question is a declaration (“I sentence you to death”), a request (“I ask that you stop doing that”) or a warning (“I warn you not to jump off the roof”).
Felicity Conditions
In order to explain the role of felicity condition, Austin wrote a very general schema:
- There must exist and accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, the procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances.
- The particular person and circumstances must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked.
- The procedure must be executed by all the participants correctly.
- Not just correctly also completely.
Explicit Performative
As Austin later notices himself, these examples belong (more or less strikingly) to what Austin calls, explicit performatives; to utter an “explicit” performative sentence is to make explicit what act one is performing. However, there are also “implicit”, “primitive”, or “inexplicit” performatives. When, for instance, one uses the word “Go!” in order to command someone to leave the room, then this utterance is part of the performance of a command; and the sentence, according to Austin, is neither true nor false; hence the sentence is a performative; – still, it is not an explicit performative, for it does not make explicit that the act the speaker is performing is a command.
As Austin observes, the acts purported to be performed by performative utterances may be socially contested. For instance, “I divorce you,” said three times by a man to his wife, may be accepted to constitute a divorce by some, but not by others.
The Two Basic Parts of Meaning
The two basic parts of the meaning are literal meaning and pragmatic meaning.
The first one is what literary and utterance means and the pragmatic meaning is what we really want to express and is not the literal or common meaning.
For instance, with the following sentence: “There is a dog in my garden”
The literal meaning would mean that there is an animal in my garden, a real dog. The pragmatic meaning could mean “my ex-boyfriend” is in the garden, because we agreed on calling him “dog”.
The Three Facets of Speech
Austin proposed that communicating a speech act consists of three elements:
- Locutionary act, by which he meant the act of saying something that makes sense in language, i.e., follows the rule of pronunciation and grammar.
- Illocutionary act, this is what Auston and his successors have mainly been concerned with the uses in which language can be put in society.
- Perlocutionary act, is concerned with what follows an utterance.