Speech Acts

The Speech Act Theory

For Austin (AUSTIN, 1962), whenever people talk, there is an intention to change the current world state. The speech is an act, and generates an act as response. People are not concerned with representing an external word, but with doing something when talking, and expecting for something when hearing. Therefore, is not important to find the true condition of a sentence, but if it is happily (or unhappily) performed. The success of the conversation is more related with the use of the appropriated speech act in relation to the dialog background than its true (or false) condition that came up from literal analysis.
Austin's principal theoretical elements are three kinds of language acts. For him, always when somebody is talking, it is possible to make difference between the locutinorary act or the phonetic one, the ilocutionary act, which is the act seen inside a conventional language and always has a grammar, and the perlocutionary act which is the act of using language with a determined intention.
Following Austin, in a next work, J. Searle (SEARLE & VANDERVERKEN, 1985), created a structure that allows to classify all the speech acts in five categories which specify the expression meaning in accordance to a conversations’ commitment model. The five illocutionary points form a space of possibilities to build an expression. Such illocutionary points are called of assertive, directives, commitments, expressive, and declaratives. Each illocutionary point has an illocutionary force and a propositional content.
For example, when a design manager says “I do not think so” or “definitely I disagree from you” or in a more polite way (s)he says “well, may be we need to think in other alternatives too”, all the sentences go to make explicit or implicit that there is a disagreement point in the conversation. From the speech act theory’s perspective, all of them have the same illocutionary point, but different illocutionary force. The propositional content or the topic proposed (accepting or rejecting a final report, for example), is expressed in several different ways.
Even Speech Act Theory seeming to be so general and ambitious, the spirit of Wittgenstein, Austin and  Searle was to create a practical method, not a theory of linguistic. Therefore, even when Speech Act theory seems to be so general sometimes, it shows itself a little limited and restrictive, and as it will be described in the next section, in a technical context, that dichotomy could be beneficial.