According
to Austin (1962) in his speech acts theory, there are three actions related to
speech acts. The first act is locutionary act which is the basic production of
meaningful utterance. This act is much related to the hearer, if the hearer
fails to understand what the speaker is saying then the speaker has failed to
do a locutionary act . For example, when a person from Indonesia (he's in
America for instance) talks to an American in bahasa 'apa kabar pak?' in
English this utterance will not produce what is called as a meaningful linguistic
expression. On the contrary when the speaker said 'how are you sir?' then the
American would understand and it is a form of locutionary act. (see more simple examples of locutionary acts)
In
uttering a sentence or word, one must have a certain intention. Most of the
time people produce well-formed utterances for a purpose, for instance the need
to communicate something to someone or to provide facts. This second dimension
is called Illocutionary act. An illocutionary act is accomplished via utterance
with a communicative intention. A speaker may perform illocutionary act to make
a promise, offer, explanation, etc, which is as proposed by Austin as
illocutionary force. (see more examples of
In
indicating illocutionary act Searle develops a device called Illocutionary
Force Indicating Device (IFID). It is an
expression to show the illocutionary force of an utterance is. For example, in
the utterance
[1.5]
‘I promise you this’
The
word ‘promise’ in [1.5] is identified as performative verb which is one of the
devices to identify illocutionary force. It is obviously indicated that the
illocutionary force of the speaker is to promise something to the hearer as the
speaker describes it explicitly. Sometimes one doesn’t explicitly mention their
intention explicitly. When this happens another IFID can be used to identify the
illocutionary force of the speaker. These are word orders, intonations, and
stresses.
[1.6
a] You’re going!
[1.6
b] You’re going?
[1.6
c] Are you going?
In these utterances can
be indicated that the illocutionary force of [1.6 a] is to tell or make decision,
while [1.6 b] is requesting confirmation and [1.6 c] is asking about the
hearer’s activity in the near future (emphasizing in word order difference).
While locutionary act is the action of making a
meaningful utterance and illocutionary act is performing an intentional
utterance, perlocutionary act talks about producing the effect of the
meaningful, intentional utterance. While making utterance that intent to make
someone to drink coffee is successfully performed, the effect is that someone
actually drank the coffee is also known as perlocutionary effect. Another
example is when a boy says to a girl “You’re beautiful”, if the girl is
attracted to the boy usually the girl will blush and feel happy; but on the
contrary, if the girl is not attracted to the speaker, then usually she will
only say “Thank you” and don’t feel as happy as in the first case. (more examples of
In
conclusion, locutionary act is the production of meaningful utterances and expressions
(“go away!”, “come here”, “who are you?”, etc) which leads to illocutionary
act, the intention of producing meaningful expression (promise, offering, etc),
which causes the performance of perlocutionary act, which is the effect of the
locutionary and illocutionary act (behavior, feeling, belief, etc).
See also: