A comprehensive review of speech act theory言语行为理论综述

A comprehensive review of speech act theory

1.Introduction:

Speech act theory is an important theory in the pragmatic study of language. It was initially proposed by the British philosopher John Austin in the 20th century 50's. According to the theory of speech acts, we are in the implementation of a behavior when talking. According to the theory of speech acts, three behaviors may be implemented simultaneously when the speaker is speaking: locutionary acts, illocutionary acts and perlocutionary acts.

a) A locutionary act is the act of uttering words, phrases, clauses and conveying literal meaning of the behavior through syntax lexicon and phonology.

b) An illocutionary act is the act of expressing t he speaker’s intention which is performed in saying something.

c) A perlocutionary act is the act performed by or resulting from saying something; it is the consequence of, or the change brought about the utterance; it is the act performed by saying something.

American philosopher-linguist John Searle made a deep study of speech act theory and classified illocutionary acts into five general types. Each type has a common, general purpose.

a) representatives: stating or describing,saying what the speaker believes to be true

b) directives: trying to get the hearer to do something

c) commissives: committing the speaker himself to some future course of action

d) expressives: expressing feelings or attitude towards an existing state

e) declarations: bringing about immediate changes by saying something

In each category of behavior, there is the same purpose.But the differentillocutionary acts with the same purposemay have different degrees of external force.

2. Previous studies:

Since the speech act theory was born, it has caused no little influence in the field of linguistics. The original contribution of the speech act theory, which occupies a special position in linguistics, is of great historical and practical significance.

In the early 1990s, Thomas analyzed Austin's speech act theory in detail, and pointed out the reason that this theory has a great influence in linguistics, mainly in the following four aspects:

A. in the true value of conditional semantics by the frustration of the introduction of how to act in a timely manner;

B. his point of view is clear and easy to understand;

C. though he has made a change before and after his views, but his work has always maintained a coherent ideological line;

D. Many of the questions he raised is still an important topic in pragmatics.

However, there are still a lot of shortcomings and deficiencies in the theory itself

and later development, which has caused considerable controversy and criticism.

Sperber and Wilson believe that there is no necessity of the existence of speech act theory, and raised the question of Levinson's point of view, which is "speech act like the premise and the meaning,is the main phenomenon that any common pragmatics theory must explain. ", and points out that "A large number of phenomena concerned by speech act theory have no special interest in pragmatics. "

3. My opinions:

As the saying goes, every coin has two sides. In my opinion, ,it is more or less worthy of our serious treatment, likesome linguistic theory which is of some great importance in the history. Speech act theory makes up the deficiency of logical positivism, and changes people's understanding of the nature of language.

But the shortcomings and deficiencies in the theory also exist.The definition of the basic concept of speech act is not very clear, andthe classification of speech act is not clear, meaning of speech act theory exists some problems.

4. Supporting evidences:

Inthe book how to do things with words, Austin made a detailed exposition for the speech act theory, but did not given a detailed definition for the basic concept of speech act.He just points out that speech actis a meaningful unit of utterance act, and think utterance is the main form of speech act. His student Searle just said "Speech act is the basic or minimal unit of language communication. " we can see that they are not given strict meaning of the concept of speech act.

Conventional indirect speech act refers to get indirect speech act by do general inference to “the literal meaning”,which has become a habitual use of standard format. The application of conventional indirect speech act is mainly for politeness to the hearer. Indirect application of a speech act is more than the direct speech act not in the meaning of a sentence, but in the meaning or intention of the speaker. For example: Could you please be a little more quiet? Literally it is to ask, but according to the conventional, it issued a directive. Another example:If you ask somebody “Can you open the door?” He answers “Yes” but does not actually do it. Actually, as the conventional indirect speech act, the question is normally a request of the hearer to do it rather than a question about his ability. And if I were the speaker, I would be angry with him. That fact that he answer “yes” but actually does not do it shows that he may misunderstand or just declines my request. But in speech act theory, the illocutionary of his answer is that he complied my request.By the literal meaning and the formation of the speech act theory, we can not be inferred his refusing meaning from the literal meaning of his words.

5.Conclusion:

Philosophers represented by Austin and Searlehave made great contributions to the speech act theory exploration.The speech act theory has made a great impact on the study of language and applied linguistics, social linguistics, pragmatics and language acquisition. In fact, many linguists have published opinions on this theory

and put forward many amendments, but in general, they have failed to break through the theoretical framework established by Austin and Searle.They simply put forward questions and revise them, and did not make a convincing conclusion from the philosophical basis, philosophical significance, and the status and explanatory power in linguistics. The speech act theory has the theory instruction function for the speech act of the concrete language and the speech act analysis of the cross cultural language communication. It is one of the core components of the study of contemporary pragmatics. Its importance is self-evident.

Reference:

[1] Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with words. Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press，2001.

[2]Searle, John R. Speech Acts[ M]. Cambridge University Press,1969.

[3]顾曰国著《的一言语行为理论评判与借鉴》,国外语言学,1994年第3期。

[4]孙淑芳著《塞尔言语行为理论综述》,解放军外国语学院学报,1999年第1期。