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sponding intentions to enable the completion of the act. 733 To Searle (1965), on the
other hand, illocutionary acts were primarily conventional in nature: “to perform
illocutionary acts is to engage in a rule-governed form of behavior.” 734 As he emphasized,
the illocutionary force can easily be misunderstood or lost if the speaker does
not follow these rules. Similar to Austin’s classification of speech acts, Searle distinguished
between propositional acts (referring and predicating), illocutionary acts
(stating, questioning, commanding, etc.), and perlocutionary acts, which refer to the
effects of illocutionary acts upon the listeners. In his view, utterances and sentences
contain two major components: the propositional indicating element which can be
judged true or false, and what he termed the “function illocutionary indicating device”.
735 The latter does not merely determine how an utterance can be interpreted but
also designates the kind of illocutionary act which is being performed. As Searle
exemplifies:
I may indicate the illocutionary act I am performing by beginning the
sentence with ‘I apologize’, ‘I warn’, ‘I state’, etc. Often in actual speech
situations the context will make clear what the illocutionary force of the
utterance is, without it being necessary the function indicating device. 736
Similar to Gumperz contextualization cues, the indicating device (such as “I state
such-and-such”) becomes a key to understand a speech act since it constitutes the
force of that act.
The application of speech act theory came to travel far beyond the field of linguistics.
The basic notion that words do not merely communicate information about
ideas and conditions in social world, but accomplish things in the world had a particularly
strong appeal to anthropologists and folklorists. The original notion of performative
utterances and illocutionary forces were applied early to ethnographies
which aimed to demonstrate the essential functions of verbal acts to accomplish and
transform social categories. 737 Studies from different parts of the world have suggested
that modernization processes during the last centuries has entailed a “linguistic
modernity”, which brought about a transition of language ideologies from indige-
733
Strawson 1964.
734
Searle 1965.
735
Searle 1969: 23. Searle distinguishes between two types of rules which create and define
illocutionary acts: constitutive and regulative. Constitutive refers to the essential character of the
illocutionary act which creates the field of action. It would be impossible for an act to take place
if constitutive rules were not in operation. Regulative rules are not an essential feature of illocutionary
acts, but define the proper conditions under which an act should be performed (Searle
1969: 34). Humphrey & Laidlaw build their theory of stipulated acts on Searle’s ideas of constructive
rules, saying that constitutive rules establish the “ontology of acts” disconnected from
the actor’s intentions (Humphrey & Laidlaw 1994: 117).
736
Searle 1965: 619.
737
See e.g. Tambiah 1968 and Finnegan 1969.
462
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008