PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE
MEANING AND USE: SPEECH ACTS
LECTURE
PROFESSOR JULIE YOO
Meaning: Content, Mood, and Tone
Content: Reference and Truth Conditions
Mood (Force)
Tone
Speech Acts
Constatives and Performatives
Rules and Infelicities
The Case of Apologizing
Performative vs Constative
The “Hereby” Criterion for Performatives
Counterexamples
Illocutionary Force and Locutionary Content
The Distinction
Other Kinds of Illocutions
Perlocutionary Effect
Cohen’s Problem
Redundancy Analysis of Performatives
Substantive Analysis of Performatives
Implications and Implicative Relations
Logical and Non-Logical Entailments
Conveyed Meanings
Invited Inference
Conversational Implicature
Two Features
Cooperative Principle
Conversational Maxims
Presuppositions and Conventional Implicature
Penalty Gauge
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MEANING: CONTENT, MOOD, AND TONE
Content: Reference and Truth Conditions
So far, we have been examining linguistic expressions of a fairly rigid and narrow form: declarative
sentences that are either true or false. This approach to the study of linguistic meaning owes its
orientation to what we can broadly call “referential” semantics, or truth-conditional semantics. On this
view, the meaning of a sentence is the condition under which it is true, and the condition under which it
is true is partly determined by the meaning of the parts of the sentence, their mode of combination, and
the objects to which they refer. So, “The cat is on the mat” is true (in English), according to this view,
because “the cat” refers to an certain object, “the mat” refers to a certain, different, object, and “is on
the” asserts that there is a certain relation between the two objects, and the correct objects are picked
out by the words and the relation between them correctly described. This seems straightforward
enough. But the truth-conditional theory meaning can’t be the whole story about meaning: the main
function of language is not just to state truths. We also need to pay careful attention to the ways in
which we use our language – “what we do with words,” as Austin says.
Mood (Force)
The content of a sentence is the proposition it expresses. The mood of a sentence, however, is the way
in which the sentence is made: as a declarative sentence, command, question, warning, and so on.
Both elements are important to the overall meaning of the sentence at the time of utterance. Let’s look
at some examples.
A.
B.
C.
D.
The cat is on the mat?
The cat is on the mat!
The cat is on the mat.
The cat is on the mat.
(odd, because Fifi hates mats …)
(God damn it! Fifi shouldn’t be there …)
(not the dog)
(not on the couch)
There is a sense in which all of these sentences express the same proposition. But the ways in which
the sentences are uttered differ between them, which colors the way in which each sentence is to be
interpreted. A competent speaker of a language could not be said to be fully competent if she has not
mastered the contribution of force to the meaning of linguistic expressions.
Tone
There is also another semantic element that is crucial for being a competent speaker of a language.
This is tone, also called “coloring” or “illumination”:
“and” vs “but”
“sweat” vs “perspire”
“mom” vs “mother”
“walk” vs “stroll”
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SPEECH ACTS
Constatives and Performatives
Sentences that purport to express a fact Austin called “constatives.”
1a.
1b.
1c.
1d.
The cat is on the mat.
Snow is white.
The present queen of the US is bald.
I am hungry.
But these aren’t the only kinds of sentences. Some sentences don’t purport to describe a situation or
assert how things are in the world (in the sense that the content of making a promise doesn’t quite
involve asserting that you’re making a promise – back to this later with Cohen). Instead, they are
uttered in order to DO something.
2a.
2b.
2c.
2d.
make promises: “I will get the paper in on Friday.”
make a move in a game: “I double your bet.”
apologize: “I’m sorry, forgive me.”
insult: “You’re an idiot!”
Each utterance is an instance of performing a certain kind of social act: to make a promise, make a
move in a game, and so on. Because they are a means to perform a social act, Austin calls them
“performatives.” And because these acts are performed through speech, they are also called “speech
acts.”
Rules and Infelicities
The kinds of rules that govern a speech act fall into two categories: constitutive and regulative.
Constitutive Rules: Those rules that you have to follow if you wish to perform the speech act
you want to perform; if you should fail to comply with a constitutive rule, then your speech act
will be abortive.
Regulative rules: Those rules that govern how well you execute the speech act; failure to
comply with these rules just means that your speech act will be defective or ineffective, not that
your entire attempt will be for naught.
Consider the game of basketball. There are certain rules you have to comply with if it is basketball you
intend to play: must dribble, not kick, must get ball in through the net to score a point, not merely
touch the net. These are constitutive rules. Regulative rules, on the other hand, are things like rules
against traveling. If you travel, then you’re not playing well. But you are still playing basketball, as
long as all the constitutive rules are fulfilled. But you aren’t playing basketball if you toss around a
football and kick the ball around.
Violation of a regulative rule that governs a speech act results in an “infelicity.” Here are some
examples: If I give you a grade for a paper based upon the kind of font you used, I’m not doing a good
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job of grading, but I am grading. This would be infelicitous grading. Some rules aren’t strictly one or
the other. For instance, the issue of timing may be one of these borderline rules whose violation can
make an apology range from infelicity to non-apology.
The Case of Apologizing
Each type of speech act is governed by a unique set of constitutive and regulative rules that make the
speech act the kind of speech act it is. One of the goals is to specify what the rules for each type of
speech act. Let’s look at the particular case of apologizing. What are the things that must be done by
the speaker to apologize? What are the surrounding circumstances that must obtain in order for the
speaker to succeed?
Constitutive: For one, it’s not the kind of thing you can get someone else to do. If you are the one
responsible for the wrongdoing, then you are the one who ultimately has to make the apology.
Someone else can’t do this for you. At best they can convey your apology, or make an excuse for you.
But this is not to apologize. Not all speech acts are like this. For instance, warning someone that the
plate is very hot need to come from you in order to be a warning. Anyone can say, “the plate is hot!”
and can count as a warning.
Regulative: In addition, it seems that the wrongdoer should indicate to the aggrieved that she takes
responsibility for the wrongdoing. There are many ways you can do this, some more effective than
others. Timing matters; if you wait too long, the apology will lose its significance, all things
considered (you weren’t kidnapped, fall into a coma, suffer amnesia, etc.). Your demeanor also
matters. For instance, if you give a long confession of guilt with facial signs of abject regret, this may
be an effective apology. But if, you roll your eyes and say, “well, if I offended you, then I’m sorry,”
this apology may not be as effective.
PERFORMATIVE VS CONSTATIVE
The “Hereby” Criterion for Performatives
So what makes a speech act performative as opposed to constative? Here is the test Austin initially
suggested, which we’ll call the “hereby criterion:”
U is constative
if
placing “hereby” before the main verb does not
make sense (i.e. it fails the hereby criterion).
1a* The cat is hereby on the mat.
1b* Snow is hereby white.
1c* The present queen of the US is hereby bald.
1d* I am hereby hungry.
U is performative
if
placing “hereby” before the main verb does
make sense (i.e. it fails the hereby criterion).
2a* make promises: “I will hereby promise ...”
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2b* make a move in a game: “I hereby double ....”
2c* apologize: “I hereby apologize ...”
So far so good. The test works for these sentences.
Counterexamples
But here are some resilient cases. Consider H:
2d* insult: “I hereby insult you…”
You put yourself in a position of ridicule if you actually say this, which is far from doing what you
intend – namely, to insult. Here are some others: “Nay,” “Hooray,” “Shame,” “Damn.” These also
don’t admit “hereby,” yet they are performative utterances. So the hereby criterion for a performative
is not sufficient after all. In fact, it also turns out that non-performatives satisfy the hereby criterion. In
other words, failing to satisfy the hereby criterion is not sufficient for being a non-performative.
3a.
3b.
3c.
3d.
I state that I did not have sexual relations with that woman.
I judge that we underestimated how long the scandal would last.
I report that Monica has decided to testify.
I advise you that it would be imprudent to save the dress.
All of these sentences pass the hereby criterion, and yet they are also constative. Consider (I): a certain
state of affairs is being declared, namely that there were no sexual relations with the said woman, and
this declaration is a fact-stating indicative sentence that has truth-conditions. But the following
sentence with the “hereby” makes sense:
3a* I hereby state that I did not have sexual relations with that woman.
performative
constative
Here, the performative is the act of stating or declaring. But it is also fact-stating – I* is true if there
were no sexual relations with the said woman, false it there were. So what’s going on? The fact, under
the usual way of interpreting I*, concerns whether or not there was sex going on, not whether the
speech act of making a statement was going on. You wouldn’t get off the hook if you said, “well, it’s
true that what I stated was that … .” According to Austin, all sentences have both aspects or both
components, even if one of the components is not as explicitly advertised as it could be. This is true for
our original constatives:
2a**
2b**
2c**
2d**
The cat is on the mat.
Snow is white.
The present queen of the US is bald.
I am hungry.
All of these are assertions, and asserting is a speech act. In fact, we can delete the explicit performative
verbs and the sentences, uttered in the same context, would still maintain their speech acts:
3a**
I did not have sex with that woman. → statement
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3b**
3c**
3d**
We underestimated how long the scandal would last. → judgment
Monica has decided to testify. → report
It would be imprudent to save the dress. → advice
ILLOCUTIONARY FORCE VS LOCUTIONARY CONTENT
The Distinction
In order to articulate these two components of the meaning of a sentence, Austin introduces these
terms: illocution vs locution. The locutionary content is the proposition expressed by the literal
sentence meaning, that component whose meaning consists of its truth-conditions. It is the RHS of a Tsentence:
4a. “The plate is hot” is true (in English) IFF the plate is hot.
The illocutionary component is the force with which the proposition is expressed. A sentence with this
content can be expressed with different illocutionary forces:
4b. That plate is hot. → statement
4c. That plate is hot! → warning
4d. That plate is hot. → report
Other Kinds of Illocutions
The upshot is this: Austin’s original distinction between performatives and constatives is not a
distinction between two classes of expressions. Instead, they are components of every single
expression. Here are some other illocutions.
admitting
announcing
assuring
authorizing
censuring
committing
complimenting
conceding
confessing
congratulating
defining
denying
hypothesizing
inquiring
insisting
insulting
proposing
thanking
Notice that all of these speech acts are acts in virtue of the intentions the speaker had at the time of
utterance. Both kinds of rules – constitutive and regulative – govern these kinds of illocutionary acts.
A regulative rule for stating is that the statement is true; a defective statement is one that is false.
Perlocutionary Effect
These are created by the use of performative verbs that are described in terms of the effects they have
on the listener rather than the intentions of the speaker. They fail the hereby criterion. Here are some
examples:
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amusing
annoying
boring
embarrassing
frightening
informing
insulting
persuading
COHEN’S PROBLEM
Return to sentences (I) – (J):
I.
J.
K.
L.
I state that I did not have sexual relations with that woman.
I judge that we underestimated how long the scandal would last.
I report that Monica has decided to testify.
I advise you that it would be imprudent to save the dress.
These sentences have truth conditions, namely, whatever happens to be the truth condition for the
expression that follows the “that.” So the truth condition of (I) would be, well, whatever it was that
went on in the Oval Office. Most people think that this T-sentence is false. BC did have sexual
relations with ML so the RHS is false, and so the entire T- sentence is false. But things aren’t as clear
as they seem. Isn’t it also the case that (I) is true because the speaker is correctly describing the kind of
speech act s/he is performing? After all, it is true that BC is stating.
There are two views we’ll consider: the Substantive Analysis of Performatives and the Redundancy
Analysis of Performatives.
Redundancy Analysis of Performatives
According to this tempting view, the ultimate truth condition for these kinds of sentences is the
locutionary content of what follows the “that” clause. The performative, in fact, can be deleted without
changing the truth value of the original sentence. They are merely force labels, but as far as the
ultimate truth condition of the sentence is concerned, they are redundant. But are they?
But here’s a problem. If the Redundancy Theory really were true, then someone who overhears the
conversation and reports it to someone else could also drop the performative and convey the same
meaning expressed by the original speaker. But as we will see, something crucial gets lost if we drop
the performative. Suppose Jane overhears Bill saying to Monica,
“I’m warning you, don’t tell anyone about the cigar.”
Would it make sense for Jane to report,
“Don’t tell anyone about the cigar.”
Surely not. To report Bill’s sentence accurately, Jane needs to say something like,
“He’s warning her not to tell anyone about the cigar,” or
“Bill is warning Monica not to tell anyone about the cigar.”
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This indicates that the performative does indeed have a role to play in the content of the sentences in
which it appears. Here is another problem. It seems that the performative prefaces have quite a lot of
internal structure; for instance, they can contain adverbial modifiers:
I insist that you take the last piece of cake.
Really, I’m adamant about my insisting that you take …
Because I’m convinced that you still want more, I couldn’t be more pleased if you
accepted my insistence that you take …
It seems that the more modifications there are, there is more “content” that gets added to the original
expression. This means that the Deflationary View cannot be sustained. So what are we to do?
Substantive Analysis
“I state that I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” is true (in English) IFF the
speaker did not have sexual relations with ML.
locutionary content of (I)
(I) is also a speech act, namely, the speech act of an assertion, and if asked whether (I) is true, one
could say BC did indeed make such an assertion. So there is a different truth condition for (I). What is
this other truth condition? In this latter (Lycan says, “degenerate”) sense, the speaker is describing
himself as performing a certain type of speech act, and the truth condition consists in whether the
speaker actually did perform the speech act in question.
“I state that I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” is true (in English) IFF the
speaker did indeed state that the speaker did not have …
self-descriptive content of the performance of (I)
If Bill was referring to whether he had performed the speech act of stating, then (I) is true (sounds like
something BC would say …). So it seems that sentences prefaced by a performative have two
meaningful components – the locutionary content and the content regarding the type of illocutionary
force that was used. But then this means that we will have to allow for Clintonian readings of these
kinds of sentences. They will be automatically true, simply for having correctly self-described the
speech act that was performed.
IMPLICATIONS AND IMPLICATIVE RELATIONS
Logical and Non-Logical Entailments
Certain sentences strictly entail others:
Bob is a bachelor.
Meaning and Use: Speech Acts
!
!
!
!
Bob is unmarried.
Bob is a male.
Someone is unmarried.
Someone is a male.
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These are cases of analytic entailment (the first two) and strict logical entailment (latter two). But we
often encounter sentences that imply others even though the implication isn’t based upon analyticity or
rules of logic. Suppose we are involved in a heated debate and you come up with a knock-down
objection to my position. I say:
All right. You got me.
→ I admit defeat.
In this context, I’m saying that you have won the debate (at least for that round). But “You got me”
doesn’t meaning “I admit defeat.” After all, those words could have been uttered in a very different
context and convey a different meaning. If I’m burgling your house and you catch me in the act, I can
also say:
All right. You got me.
→ You caught me in the act of stealing.
If you think about the number of times sentences like this get made and the number of times competent
speakers correctly pick up on the intended meaning, it’s quite remarkable. Grice attempts to explain
this communicative phenomenon by appealing to the idea of there being rules or principles that govern
“cooperative conversation.”
Conveyed Meanings
This is when the speaker says one thing but means another where the spoken utterance is used to mean
the other (unlike those rare occasions where a speaker may say one thing and mean another but where
the spoken utterance isn’t used as a means to get to the other).
Mary: Is my blind date cute?
Jane: Your blind date has a great personality.
Invited Inference
This is when we hear an utterance whose literal meaning means one thing, but interpret you interpret
the utterance in a slightly different way:
M. The sports car was going 120 mph and it crashed into a tree.
Here, the “and” is interpreted as having a causal meaning. The causal inference is “invited.” It’s
because the car was going so fast that it crashed. We can’t switch around the conjuncts and have the
altered sentence mean the same as the original. We can see this when we compare this with another
sentence:
N. The sports car was going 120mph and it was red.
Here, we can alter the order of the conjuncts and still preserve the same meaning. The word “and” also
invites a temporal inference:
O. I finished college and got a job as an editor for the New Yorker.
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This has a different meaning from:
P. I got a job as an editor for the New Yorker and I finished college.
CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE
Two Features of Conversational Implicature
One works them out through a process of reasoning (often subconscious), but it’s a process that
involves two components: a negative part (the speaker said p but didn’t literally mean p), and a
positive part (the speaker must have meant q).
Conversational Implicatures are also cancellable: “Your date has a great personality – not that he’s not
also really cute because he is. But as it happens he also has a great personality.”
Cooperative Principle
As I stated before, it is quite remarkable how successfully we recover the intended meanings conveyed
by sentences whose literal meanings different from their intended ones. What are the rules that enable
us to do this? Grice’s theory of Conversational Implicature is an attempt to enumerate the various
kinds of implications and explain the rules that govern the recovery of the intended meanings. A core
principle is what Grice calls the “Cooperative Principle”:
(CP)
Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the
stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of
the talk-exchange in which you are engaged. (Lycan, p. 191)
Conversational Maxims
Does this just mean, “Say the right thing at the right time”? (That would be funny since it violates CP).
Grice fleshes this out with various “conversational maxims”:
M1
Maxim of Strength: Make your contribution to a conversation as
informative as is required (for the current purpose of the exchange).
M2
Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
M3
Do not say what you believe to be false.
M4
Maxim of Evidence: Do not say that for which you lack adequate
evidence.
M5
Maxim of Relevance: Be relevant.
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M6
Avoid ambiguity.
M7
Be brief.
There are many other maxims that all competent speakers of a language tacitly conform to when they
converse, and there is also the matter of how we correctly contextualize the utterances so that even in
the absence of explicit specifications, we get what the speaker is talking about:
Pointing to a vase, I say, “That’s lovely.”
In most usual circumstances, you take this to mean that I’m saying of the vase to which I am pointing
that it is lovely, not the cubic inch of air above the vase or bottom 12/17th segment of the vase or the
fact that it is a stationary object, and so on. In order to rule out these possible interpretations and to
home in on the right one, there must also be a vast amount of shared knowledge, background
information, and just common human interests for speakers to correctly contextualize the utterances
they make and hear. [AI and the Frame Problem]
Now, not all speakers conform to all of these maxims. We all know the chatty neighbor (violate
Brevity Maxim) , the loopy tangential friend (violate the Relevance Maxim), the outright compulsive
liar (the Don’t Lie Maxim), the one who jumps to conclusions (Maxim of Evidence). These are people
in their capacity as speakers. But we are also familiar with people in their capacity as listeners who
aren’t quite “on the ball:” The one who never gets a double entendre, the one who tends to take
everything literally, the one who takes a very long time to get a hint, and so on. [Peggy at shoe shop]
The mastery of conversational implicature certainly comes in degrees and the kind of implicatures one
generates are also a matter of taste.
Presupposition and Conventional Implicature
Presuppositions: We have already seen this other kind of Implicature in your brief discussion of
Strawson’s criticism of Russell’s theory of descriptions. Strawson claims that statements involving
non-existent characters are not false, the way Russell claims they are. Instead, they lack truth-value –
they are infelicitous. The reason they are infelicitous is that they presuppose an illicit assumption,
namely, that the things they are talking about exist when in fact they don’t. Here are some other
examples that involve semantic presuppositions:
Q. How is your husband, Mary?
Mary is married.
R. Why are you so late coming to dinner?
Dinner was to be served at a certain (earlier) time.
S. Descartes refuted the objection raised by X.
Descartes’s argument against the objection was successful.
These differ from logical entailments because their implications are not logically related to the
sentences.
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If S1 logically entails S2, then the falsity of S2 directly leads to the falsity of S1 (and
hence, the truth of its negation).
If S1 presupposes S2, then the falsity of S2 does not lead to the falsity of S1, but rather to
its lack of truth value.
And they differ from Conversational Implicatures because they are not cancellable.
Conventional Implicature: This is Implicature in the sense that a speaker is implying more than what
she literally says, but it differs from Conversational Implicature in two ways:
1) Conventional Implicatures are immediate, not worked out.
2) Conventional Implicatures are not cancellable.
T. Frank is a Wall Street banker but he’s rich – not that Wall Street Bankers are poor.
(T) implicates that Wall Street Bankers are poor.
U. Frank is a banker and his friend Lucy owns a yacht too – not to imply that Frank also
owns a yacht.
(U) implicates that Frank owns a yacht.
These attempts to cancel sound very odd. The use of “ but” is very misleading as is the use of “too.”
Penalty Gauge
⋅
⋅
⋅
If S1 entails S2 and S2 is false, then the penalty is that S1 is false.
If S1 presupposes S2 and S2 is false, then the penalty is that S2 goes without a truth value.
If S1 conventionally implicates S2 and S2 is false, then S1 is very misleading – a flagrant
violation of Grice’s Maxim 1.
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