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As Austin argues, performative utterances produce results or effects on the listener
when they are spoken in a specific situation and context. His examples of performatives
include speech acts drawn from ceremonial, judicial and contractual
speech act situations, such as inaugurations and weddings. For instance, when the
bride in the course of a Christian wedding utters “I do” she actually agrees to take the
man to be her lawful husband. The context is essential for the ability to generate effective
speech and Austin offers a schematization of the conditions necessary for a felicitous
speech performance: there must exist an accepted conventional procedure that
has a certain conventional effect (e.g., “I do” voiced by man and woman within the
context of a wedding ceremony); the particular person and circumstances must be
appropriate for the invocation (e.g., only the bride and groom can say “I do” during a
wedding); and the procedure must be executed correctly and completely (e.g., the
bride cannot say “I do not” or only “I”). The failure to meet these conditions leads to
a breakdown of the performative, in other words, it does not simply take place.
Austin continues to classify three different types of acts that determine different
dimensions of sentence uses: locutionary acts, “which [are] roughly equivalent to
‘meaning’ in the traditional sense” – the semantic content of an utterance; illocutionary
acts which are “utterances which have a certain (conventional) force” and perform
acts through saying something; and finally perlocutionary acts, which is “what
we bring about or achieve by saying something”, in other words the consequence of
saying the utterance. 732 For instance, when Sikhs are uttering the entextualized salutation
“Sat Sri Akal” the locutionary meaning may point to a theological postulate
about God’s ultimate nature and qualities (in this case that God is true (sat) and eternal
(akal)), but if we understand the interactive setting in which the utterance contextualizes,
we may either recognize the act as a greeting, a marker that ends a ceremony,
or the congregation’s public approval of a decision or event that has just taken
place. The propositional meaning of the utterance informs us on the qualities which
Sikhs may attribute to the divine, but conventions are the sources of successful performance
of a speech act and of its illocutionary force. Again, if my intention was to
greet Sikh friends by uttering the phrase ”Sat Sri Akal” in an ordinary social meeting,
most would understand that the illocutionary force of my speech act is to greet since
they belong to a Sikh culture and know the Punjabi language. But if I would use the
same phrase for greeting my Swedish friends most would not understand it at all
because the language and the cultural conventions for greeting acts in the Sikh culture
are alien to them. In this sense, both the semantic aspects of language and the
conventional rules of language use instruct us on what is appropriate or not in a
given situational context in order to get it right.
In response to Austin’s work scholars came to revise the methodologies in
speech act theory and paid considerable attention to the factors which determine
illocutionary acts. Strawson (1964) first formulated the intentionalist approach which
maintains that illocutionary acts only occur if the speaker has the properly corre-
732
Austin 1962: 109.
461
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008