Speech Acts, Communication Problems, and Discourse Differences

Posted on Aug 26, 2024 in Teaching & Education

9) Speech Acts

When you do something, you are performing an action. When you ask for something, you are also performing an action – the act of asking. This perspective provides insight into the utility of human communication: humans use communication as a tool to achieve their goals.

In his book “How to Do Things With Words,” Austin describes Conventional Speech Acts: sentence types that have conventional relationships to certain types of speech acts, such as:

  • Declarative: (assertions/statements)
  • Interrogative: (questions)
  • Imperative: (orders)
  • Optative: (wishes)

There is another type of act called a Performative Utterance, which are acts made by certain people who have the authority to perform them. For example, a priest marrying a couple.

Searle’s Classification includes:

  • Directives
  • Commissives
  • Representatives
  • Declaratives
  • Expressives

Three Parts of a Speech Act (Austin):

  1. Locutionary Act (part): the act of saying something, without further interpreting the underlying intentions.
  2. Illocutionary Act: the speaker’s intention upon saying the utterance. The speaker can make a statement, an offer, a promise, etc., in uttering a sentence.
  3. Perlocutionary Act: the effect that the speech act has on the participants.

10) Communication Problems at the Level of Implicature

  • Noise, Pronunciation, Lack of Linguistic Competence -> Impossible Inferential Hypothesis -> Non-understanding
  • Contextual Assumption(s) Not Supplied -> Missing Implicature -> Puzzled Understanding. We understand explicitly, but we are unable to understand the contextual information to get the implicature. Example: “Nice cat! Is it male or female?” “It’s three-colored.” (All three-colored cats are female (context) -> The cat is female (implicature)).
  • Alternative Contextual Assumptions -> Alternative Implicature -> Alternative Misunderstanding. Example: “My parents are away this weekend.” -> I can/I can’t (implicature).
  • Hearer Stops at the Level of Explicature -> Implicature as Explicature -> Alternative Understanding.

11) Differences Between Spoken and Written Discourse

1. Sounds Versus Written Signs

Speech has changes of pitch. Writing, however, has a punctuation system, partly used for showing the structure of the sentence and partly for showing vocal aspects of language.

2. Speed

The everyday processes of reading and speaking have their own characteristics. Reading can take place at speeds faster than speech. Besides, the mind processes spoken sounds differently from written signs.

3. Permanency

Writing is permanent marks recorded on paper; speech is only sounds passing through the air. Writing stores the information on paper, speech in the memory. Written language is used to keep a permanent record, but speech leaves no trace on the world.

4. First and Final Drafts

Writing can be worked over time and again. Speech is always a first draft. Apart from a few gifted or trained public speakers, people do not plan in detail the final version of what they are saying. Speech, therefore, comes out full of the mistakes and distortions characteristic of a first draft.

5. Interaction Between Listener and Speaker

Usually, the listener and speaker are physically present in the same speech situation; they can see each other and be aware of what is going on. In writing, however, a reader and writer may never meet. Any written document can be read anywhere by anyone, not just by those actually present in the speech situation.

6. Purposes of Language

Speech and writing are used for different purposes. Written records are kept for the future. A meeting may use spoken language, but the transcripts are often kept in writing.

7. Formality

Writing is an authority to be trusted in a way that speech is not; ‘put it in writing,’ ‘It’s in the dictionary.’ Speech in a literate society is used for reasons that are more immediate.

8. Contextualization

Unlike spoken utterances, a written text lacks an immediate context. Though it is true that a reader must, in order to properly understand a written text, “place it in a context,” a written text is – as a rule and in comparison with spoken utterances – relatively explicit and less open to contextual constraints.

9. Grammatical Differences

SPOKEN:

  1. No complex constructions
  2. Coordination
  3. Active voice
  4. Indexicals (I, you, there…)
  5. Incomplete information
  6. Ordinary discourse markers
  7. Repetitions, fillers, hesitations

WRITTEN:

  1. Complex constructions
  2. Subordination
  3. Passive voice
  4. No explicit indexicals
  5. Complete information
  6. Formal discourse markers
  7. No repetitions, fillers, etc.