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Speech Act Theory is one of the foundational theories of pragmatics, and it rests on a deceptively simple observation: language is not merely a tool for describing the world but a tool for acting in it. When we speak we do not only report — we promise, warn, request, apologise, christen, threaten, congratulate, sentence and dare. To say "I promise to pay you back" is not to describe a promise; it is to make one. The theory was originated by the philosopher J.L. Austin (1911-1960) in his Oxford and Harvard lectures, and subsequently systematised and extended by his student John Searle (1932-2018). Keeping the two contributions distinct is itself examinable: Austin laid the foundations and the three-part analysis; Searle built the taxonomy and the account of indirect speech acts on top of them. As with all the analytical methods on the AQA specification, this toolkit is integrated across Paper 1, Paper 2 and the Non-Examined Assessment (NEA), serving AO1 most directly, with strong work extending into AO3 by linking illocutionary choices to context, power and purpose.
Austin's theory was presented in his posthumously published lectures How to Do Things with Words (1962). He began by attacking a long-standing assumption in philosophy — that the central function of a sentence is to state a fact that is then true or false. Austin called such fact-stating sentences constatives ("The cat is on the mat", "Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius"). Against these he set a class of utterances that do something quite different.
Austin observed that some utterances do not describe a state of affairs at all — uttering them constitutes the performance of an action. He called these performatives.
Crucially, these are not true or false — it makes no sense to reply "that's false" to "I promise to pay you back". Instead they are felicitous (successful) or infelicitous (unsuccessful). Many performatives contain a performative verb in the first-person present (promise, name, pronounce, bet, apologise) and can take the word "hereby" as a test ("I hereby name this ship..."). Austin distinguished explicit performatives, which name the act with a performative verb, from implicit (primary) performatives, which perform the act without naming it: "Be there at six" performs an order without the verb order; "I'll be there at six" performs a promise without the verb promise.
A complication Austin himself eventually faced is that the neat line between constative and performative collapses under pressure. To assert "The cat is on the mat" is itself to perform the act of asserting, which can be felicitous or infelicitous (you can assert without evidence). This realisation pushed Austin towards a more general theory in which every utterance is a kind of act — the three-part analysis below.
Performatives only succeed if appropriate circumstances obtain. Austin called these felicity conditions — the conditions that must hold for a speech act to come off.
For "I now pronounce you husband and wife" to be felicitous:
When conditions fail, Austin diagnosed two kinds of failure. A misfire occurs when the act simply does not come off because the procedure or circumstances were wrong — a child "marrying" two dolls, or a bystander "sentencing" a defendant, achieves nothing. An abuse occurs when the act is performed but insincerely — a promise made with no intention of keeping it is still a promise, but a defective, abused one.
Key Definition: Felicity conditions — the conditions that must be satisfied for a speech act to be performed successfully. Failure produces either a misfire (the act does not take effect) or an abuse (the act takes effect but is insincere).
Having abandoned the strict performative/constative split, Austin proposed that every utterance simultaneously performs three acts. This trichotomy is the heart of the theory and the part most often tested.
The locutionary act is the act of producing a meaningful utterance — saying something with a determinate form and meaning. Austin sub-divided it into the phonetic act (producing sounds), the phatic act (producing words in a recognised grammatical structure), and the rhetic act (producing those words with a definite sense and reference). For analytical purposes, the locutionary act is simply what is said — the literal propositional content.
"It's cold in here." — locutionarily, a declarative statement about the temperature of the room.
The illocutionary act is the act performed in saying something — the speaker's communicative intention, the force the utterance carries. This is the level speech act theory is principally about, and the term illocutionary force is the one to use in analysis.
"It's cold in here." — illocutionarily, this might be:
- a statement of fact (asserting);
- a request to close the window (requesting);
- a complaint about the heating (complaining);
- a hint that the listener should fetch a blanket (hinting).
The same locution carries different illocutionary forces in different contexts — which is precisely why context is indispensable to the analysis.
Key Definition: Illocutionary act / illocutionary force — what the speaker is doing by saying something (requesting, promising, warning, apologising, declaring). It is the speaker's intended communicative function, distinct from both the literal words and the effect on the listener.
The perlocutionary act is the effect the utterance actually has on the listener — the consequences it produces, intended or not.
"It's cold in here." — perlocutionarily, the listener closes the window, fetches a blanket, feels guilty about the heating bill, or ignores the speaker entirely.
The key feature of perlocutionary effects is that they are not guaranteed and not always intended. A warning meant to produce caution might instead produce panic, defiance or amusement. Because illocutionary force is about intention and perlocutionary effect is about outcome, the two can come apart — an order (illocution) that nobody obeys still failed at the perlocutionary level while remaining a perfectly real order.
| Level | Question | Example ("It's cold in here") |
|---|---|---|
| Locutionary | What was said? | A statement about the room's temperature. |
| Illocutionary | What was the speaker doing by saying it? | Requesting that someone close the window. |
| Perlocutionary | What effect did it have? | The listener closed the window. |
John Searle built on Austin in Speech Acts (1969) and the essay "A Classification of Illocutionary Acts" (1976). His principal additions are a systematic taxonomy of illocutionary acts, a rigorous restatement of felicity conditions, and the influential analysis of indirect speech acts.
Searle, partly in response to what he saw as inconsistencies in Austin's own attempt at classification, proposed five categories, organised in large part by their direction of fit — whether the words are trying to match the world, or the world is being brought to match the words.
| Category | Function | Examples | Direction of Fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Representatives (Assertives) | Commit the speaker to the truth of a proposition | Asserting, claiming, reporting, stating, describing, concluding | Words-to-world (the words are made to match reality) |
| Directives | Attempt to get the listener to do something | Requesting, ordering, commanding, advising, recommending, begging, inviting | World-to-words (reality is to be brought to match the words) |
| Commissives | Commit the speaker to a future course of action | Promising, vowing, pledging, threatening, offering, guaranteeing | World-to-words (the speaker commits to making reality match) |
| Expressives | Express the speaker's psychological state | Thanking, apologising, congratulating, welcoming, condoling, complaining | No direction of fit (the truth of the proposition is presupposed) |
| Declarations | Bring about a change in the world by the utterance itself | Declaring war, dismissing, christening, sentencing, pronouncing married, resigning | Double direction of fit (saying makes it so) |
Key Definition: Searle's five categories are representatives/assertives (committing to truth), directives (getting the hearer to act), commissives (committing oneself to future action), expressives (venting a psychological state), and declarations (changing institutional reality by the saying of it). The first four describe or influence the world; only declarations alter it directly.
The category of declarations is special and powerful: it is the modern descendant of Austin's explicit performatives. A declaration can change the world ("you're fired", "I name this ship...", "I find the defendant guilty") but only when uttered by someone with the requisite institutional authority and within the right procedure — which is why declarations are so tightly bound up with power.
Searle restated felicity conditions as four types of rule that constitute each act. For the act of promising:
| Condition Type | Description | Example: Promising |
|---|---|---|
| Propositional content | What the utterance must be about | It predicates a future act of the speaker. |
| Preparatory | Background that must hold | The speaker can do the act; the hearer wants it done; it is not obvious it would happen anyway. |
| Sincerity | The speaker's required mental state | The speaker genuinely intends to do the act. |
| Essential | What the utterance counts as | It counts as undertaking an obligation to do the act. |
If a condition fails, the act is defective in a corresponding way. A promise made with no intention of keeping it satisfies the propositional, preparatory and essential conditions but breaches the sincerity condition — Austin's "abuse".
A point that Austin stressed, and that candidates often neglect, is the importance of uptake — the hearer's recognition of the illocutionary force the speaker intended. For an illocutionary act to come off, Austin argued, it must in general secure uptake: the hearer must understand which act is being performed. If I say "I warn you the bridge is unsafe" and you simply do not register that I am warning you (perhaps you take it as an idle remark), the warning has, in an important sense, misfired at the level of uptake even though the words were spoken.
This makes speech acts irreducibly interactional: they are not completed by the speaker alone but require the hearer's recognition, which is why context, shared knowledge and conventional form matter so much to whether an act succeeds. It also opens a rich seam for analysis of misunderstanding and strategic ambiguity. A speaker can exploit the uptake requirement deliberately — phrasing a threat so that it can be retracted as "only a joke" if challenged, or an order so that it can be reframed as "merely a suggestion" — precisely because the force depends on what the hearer is led to recognise. When you analyse data in which participants dispute what was meant ("That wasn't an order, it was advice"; "I never promised, I only said I'd try"), you are analysing a contest over uptake, and naming it as such is a precise and sophisticated move.
Searle's most analytically fertile contribution is the indirect speech act — an utterance whose intended illocutionary force differs from the force its grammatical form would literally suggest. There are three basic sentence forms (declarative, interrogative, imperative) and three prototypical forces (statement, question, directive). When form and force align, the act is direct; when they diverge, it is indirect.
| Utterance | Grammatical Form | Literal Force | Indirect Force |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Can you pass the salt?" | Interrogative | Question about ability | Request |
| "I'd like you to be quiet." | Declarative | Statement of desire | Request/command |
| "It's hot in here." | Declarative | Statement about temperature | Request to open a window |
| "Why don't you sit down?" | Interrogative | Question about reasons | Invitation/suggestion |
| "Would you mind closing the door?" | Interrogative | Question about willingness | Request |
| "Someone should clean this mess up." | Declarative | Statement about obligation | Directive/hint |
Indirect speech acts saturate everyday talk, and the principal reason is face: directness can be face-threatening (Lesson 8). The bald imperative "Close the window" imposes openly on the hearer's autonomy, whereas "Could you close the window?" — a request dressed as a question about ability — softens the imposition by appearing to give the hearer an out. The choice of an indirect form is therefore rarely neutral; it usually encodes the speaker's reading of the power relationship and the weight of the imposition.
Key Definition: Indirect speech act — an utterance whose intended illocutionary force differs from the force conventionally associated with its grammatical form. "Can you pass the salt?" is grammatically interrogative but functionally a directive.
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