To produce an utterance is to engage in
a certain kind of interaction. This is a fact that, until recently, logicians
and philosophers of language have tended to overlook thought it has been
stressed by linguists, psychologists, sociolinguists, and anthropologists. One
of the most features of the theory of speech act, which was introduced into the
philosophy of language by J. L. Austin, is that it give explicit recognition to
the social or interpersonal dimension of language behaviour and provide a general
framework for the discussion of semantic and syntactic distinctions that
linguists have traditionally described in terms of mood and modality (in Lyons
1977:p.725).
Austin criticizes the view that the main
purpose of sentences would be to state facts or to describe some state of
affairs as either true or false. He argues against, which retains the view that
the only meaningful statements are those that are verifiable (Austin.1976: p.2).
Instead, Austin claims that such truth-evaluable sentences only constitute one
type of utterance, pointing out that there are other types of utterances which
are neither true nor false, but nonetheless meaningful. He calls this second
type of utterance "performative".
Performatives are used to carry out an action. In that they differ from other
types of declarative sentences (constatives) which only describe the world
(constatives) in systematic ways. On the syntactic level, however, both
performatives and constatives take the grammatical form of declarative
sentences. Austin revises his theory considerably in the course of his lectures
and eventually replaces the dichotomy ‘performative’ vs. ‘constative’ with a
more general theory of speech acts which regards every utterance as a type of
action.
Lyons (1977) which is cited by Nitiasih
shows that there are two characteristics of speech act, they are:
1) Speech act does not refer to the act of
speaking as such (i.e. to the production of actual spoken utterance), but to
something more abstract.
2) Speech act is not restricted to communication
by means of spoken language because there are also certain non-linguistic
communicative acts conveying certain meanings.
Speech act can be analysed on three
levels. In Austin’s further development of investigating about speech act, he
drew three dictinctions between Locutionary acts, Illocutionary acts, and
Perlocutionary acts as the following:
1) A Locutionary Act is an act of saying;
the production of meaningful utterance, the utterance of certain noises, the
utterance of certain words in a certain construction, and the utterance of them
with a certain ‘meaning’ in the favourite philosophical sense of that word,
i.e. with a certain sense and a certain reference (Austin 1962: p.944 as cited
by Lyons 1977: p.730). see
2) An Illocutionary Act is an act performed
in saying something; making a statement or promise, issuing a command or
request, asking a question, christening a ship, etc. see
3) A Perlocutionary Act is an act performed
by means of saying something; getting someone to believe that something is so,
persuading someone to do something, moving someone to anger, consoling someone
in his distress, etc. see
A short illustration example of the
relationship between those three acts above can be seen as follows:
In uttering the locution "Is there any salt?" at
the dinner table, one may thereby perform the illocutionary act of requesting salt, as well as the distinct locutionary
act of uttering the interrogatory sentence about the presence of
salt, and the further perlocutionary act of causing somebody to hand
one the salt.
