The Chang & Woo Approach
On other hand, the Speech Act Theory itself applied to IT-Design (Information Technologies Design) was criticized by several CSCW’s researchers (LJUNGBERG & HOLM, 1997). However, it is possible to think that formal environments, like computer or networked systems, have less implications from these critiques. In the Ljungberg-Holm words "The basic standpoint is that speech act theory may be useful, but only if one is aware of its shortcoming". These shortcomings have philosophic, theoretical and methodological consequences.An example of an application of Speech-Act Theory that was forced to overcome the limitations of the action-oriented model was the negotiation model proposed by Chang & Woo (CHANG & WOO, 1994). This Model is showed in the next figure.
Fig. 2.- The Chang-Woo Speech-Act Based Negotiation Structure
Chang & Woo "did not use the better-known speech act classification by Searle because it was not suited for supporting negotiation". They used the Struggle and Institutional Models: two of the 24 models given by Ballmer & Brennensthul, obtained by grouping meaning categories composed of German verbs. The next figure shows relations in the Ballmer Brennensthul speech-act classification.
Fig. 3.- Relation among models (adapted from Fig. 1 in Chang & Woo.)
The choice of Chang & Woo was based on the observation that the
Searle's speech act classification is unidirectional, because it considers
"speech acts from the speaker's point of view only, there is no analysis
of interaction between the speaker and the hearer".
Nowadays, there are still critiques to the limitations of the use of
Speech act theories and systems based on it but, by other side, looking
at the formalisms used to prescribe collaborative activities, an approach
based on it remains to be very flexible, specially when the limitations
of speech act theories as linguistic general theory are considered reduced,
as proposed by Ljungberg-Holm.
