A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

446 speech act
illocutionary force and the perlocutionary effect of the language). Similarly,
the speech event is seen as the basic unit for the analysis of spoken
interaction, i.e. the emphasis is on the role of the participants in constructing a
discourse of verbal exchanges.
Phonetics and psycholinguistics have come to pay increasing attention to
constructing models of the neurophysiological mechanisms hypothesized to
underlie speech behaviour. In this respect, two main branches of speech analysis
have developed: speech production, involving the planning and execution of acts
of speaking; and speech perception, involving the perception and interpretation
of the sound sequences of speech. The term speech recognition (or speech reception)
is used to identify the initial stage of the decoding process involved in
speech perception – and also the automatic decoding of speech by machine.
Speaker recognition is the analysis of speech to infer the identity of the speaker
or to check a claimed identity (speaker verification). The whole activity of the
perception and production of speech is known as speech processing. See also
direct (2), displaced, language, speaker recognition, speech recognition,
speech synthesis.
speech act A term derived from the work of the philosopher J. L. Austin (1911–
60), and now used widely in linguistics, to refer to a theory which analyses
the role of utterances in relation to the behaviour of speaker and hearer in
interpersonal communication. It is not an ‘act of speech’ (in the sense of
parole), but a communicative activity (a locutionary act), defined with
reference to the intentions of speakers while speaking (the illocutionary force
of their utterances) and the effects they achieve on listeners (the perlocutionary
effect of their utterances). Several categories of speech act have been proposed,
viz. directives (speakers try to get their listeners to do something, e.g. begging,
commanding, requesting), commissives (speakers commit themselves to a future
course of action, e.g. promising, guaranteeing), expressives (speakers express
their feelings, e.g. apologizing, welcoming, sympathizing), declarations (the
speaker’s utterance brings about a new external situation, e.g. christening,
marrying, resigning) and representatives (speakers convey their belief about
the truth of a proposition, e.g. asserting, hypothesizing). The verbs which are
used to indicate the speech act intended by the speaker are sometimes known as
performative verbs. The criteria which have to be satisfied in order for a
speech act to be successful are known as felicity conditions.
speech and hearing science
see speech
speech chain see chain (1)
speech community In linguistics, a term which describes any regionally or
socially definable human group which can be identified by the use of a shared
spoken language or language variety. It can vary in size from a tiny cluster
of speakers to whole nations or supranational groups (such as the Russian-using
speech community in Asia).
speech event In sociolinguistics and the study of discourse, a term describing
a communicative exchange made meaningful by culturally specific structures