With speech act theory assuming a renewed importance in the field of literary studies and philosophy, Foundations of Speech Act Theoryoffers a timely, thorough and, above all, compelling examination of the complexities of illocutionary acts, performatives, and their phenomenological basis. Savas Tsohatzidis has collected an impressive range of international scholars on the subject. Clearly demonstrating the relevance of speech act theory to semantic theory, the collection further interrogates the inability of pragmatic theories of illocution to properly locate such speech acts within the logic of phenomenology and intersubjectivity. Extending this analysis to the related discipline of philosophy, Tsohatzidis's contributors provide an elucidating investigation of problems lying outside the field of the philosophy of language, while also offering other alternative and rigorous perspectives for linguistic and philosophical inquiry.
Foundations of Speech Act Theory investigates the importance of speech act theory to the problem of meaning in linguistics and philosophy. The papers in this volume, written by respected philosophers and linguists, significantly advance standards of debate in this area. Beginning with a detailed introduction to the individual contributors, this collection demonstrates the relevance of speech acts to semantic theory. It includes essays unified by the assumption that current pragmatic theories are not well equipped to analyse speech acts satisfactorily, and concludes with five studies which assess the relevance of speech act theory to the understanding of philosophical problems outside the area of philosophy of language.
This is a formal and systematic study of the logical foundations of speech act theory. The study of speech acts has been a flourishing branch of the philosophy of language and linguistics over the last two decades, and John Searle has of course himself made some of the most notable contributions to that study in the sequence of books Speech Acts (1969), Expression and Meaning (1979) and Intentionality (1983). In collaboration with Daniel Vanderveken he now presents the first formalised logic of a general theory of speech acts, dealing with such things as the nature of an illocutionary force, the logical form of its components, and the conditions of success of elementary illocutionary acts. The central chapters present a systematic exposition of the axioms and general laws of illocutionary logic.
In the study of language, as in any other systematic study, there is no neutral terminology. Every technical term is an expression of the assumptions and theoretical presuppositions of its users; and in this introduction, we want to clarify some of the issues that have surrounded the assumptions behind the use of the two terms "speech acts" and "pragmatics". The notion of a speech act is fairly well understood. The theory of speech acts starts with the assumption that the minimal unit of human communica tion is not a sentence or other expression, but rather the performance of certain kinds of acts, such as making statements, asking questions, giving orders, describing, explaining, apologizing, thanking, congratulating, etc. Characteristically, a speaker performs one or more of these acts by uttering a sentence or sentences; but the act itself is not to be confused with a sentence or other expression uttered in its performance. Such types of acts as those exemplified above are called, following Austin, illocutionary acts, and they are standardly contrasted in the literature with certain other types of acts such as perlocutionary acts and propositional acts. Perlocutionary acts have to do with those effects which our utterances have on hearers which go beyond the hearer's understanding of the utterance. Such acts as convincing, persuading, annoying, amusing, and frightening are all cases of perlocutionary acts.
The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction is an invaluable reference work featuring contributions from leading global scholars, available both online and as a three-volume print set. The definitive international reference work on a topic of major and increasing importance, in a new series of sub-disciplinary international encyclopedias Provides state-of-the-art research for scholars in a highly interactive and accessible format, available both online and as a three-volume print set Covers key research topics in the field with contributions from a team of experienced, global editors Successfully brings into a single source, explication of all of the fascinating and ground-breaking Language and Social Interaction work developing globally and across subjects Part of The Wiley Blackwell-ICA International Encyclopedias of Communication series, published in conjunction with the International Communication Association. Online version available at www.wileyicaencyclopedia.com
Speech acts are an important and integral part of day-to-day life in all languages. In language acquisition, the need to teach speech acts in a target language has been demonstrated in studies conducted in the field of interlanguage pragmatics which indicate that the performance of speech acts may differ considerably from culture to culture, thus creating communication difficulties in cross-cultural encounters. Considering these concerns, the aim of this volume is two-fold: to deal with those theoretical approaches that inform the process of learning speech acts in particular contextual and cultural settings; and, secondly, to present a variety of methodological proposals, grounded on research-based ideas, for the teaching of the major speech acts in second/foreign language classrooms. This volume is a valuable theoretical and practical resource not only for researchers, teachers and students interested in speech act learning/teaching but also for textbook writers wishing to have an informed opinion on the pedagogical implications derived from research on speech act performance.
At the birth of analytic philosophy Frege created a paradigm that is centrally important to how meaning has been understood in the twentieth century. Frege invented the now familiar distinctions of sense and force, of sense and reference, of concept and object. He introduced the conception of sentence meaning as residing in truth-conditions and argued that semantics is a normative enterprise distinct from psychology. Most importantly, he created modern quantification theory,engendering the idea that the syntactic and semantic forms of modern logic underpin the meanings of natural-language sentences. Stephen Barker undertakes to overthrow Frege's paradigm, rejecting all the above-mentioned features.The framework he offers is a speech-act-based approach to meaning in which semantics is entirely subsumed by pragmatics. In this framework: meaning resides in syntax and pragmatics; sentence-meanings are not propositions but speech-act types; word-meanings are not objects, functions, or properties, but again speech-act types; pragmatic phenomena one would expect not to figure in semantics, such as pretence, enter into the logical form of sentences; a compositional semantics is provided byshowing how speech-act types combine together to form complex speech-act types; the syntactic structures invoked are not those of quantifiers, open sentences, variables, variable-binding, etc., rather they are structures specific to speech-act forms, which link logical form and surface grammar veryclosely.According to Barker, a natural language - a system of thought - is an emergent entity that arises from the combination of simple intentional structures, and certain non-representational cognitive states. It is embedded in, and part of, a world devoid of normative facts qua extra-linguistic entities. The world, in which the system is embedded, is a totality of particular states of affairs. There is no logical complexity in re; it contains mereological complexity only. Some truths havetruth-makers, but others, logically complex truths, lack them. Nevertheless, the truth-predicate is univocal in meaning.Renewing Meaning is a radical, ambitious work which offers to transform the semantics of natural language.
A direct successor to Searle's Speech Acts (C.U.P. 1969), Expression and Meaning refines earlier analyses and extends speech-act theory to new areas including indirect and figurative discourse, metaphor and fiction.
In Meaning and Speech Acts Daniel Vanderveken further develops the logic of speech acts and the logic of propositions to construct a general semantic theory of natural languages.
