20.12.03 · philosophy / philosophy-of-language

Speech act theory: Austin, Searle, Grice, and how words do things

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Anchor (Master): Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953); Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962, William James Lectures 1955); Searle, Speech Acts (1969); Searle, Indirect Speech Acts (1975); Searle, A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts (Synthese 1976); Grice, Meaning (Phil. Rev. 1957); Grice, Logic and Conversation (William James Lectures 1967, published 1975 in Syntax and Semantics 3); Bach and Harnish 1979; Brown and Levinson, Politeness (1978/1987); Sperber and Wilson, Relevance (1986); Vanderveken, Meaning and Speech Acts (1990-1991)

Intuition Beginner

Language does not just describe the world. It also acts on it. When a judge says "I sentence you to ten years," the words do not report a sentence that already exists; they create one. When you say "I promise to pay you back," you are not describing a promise; you are making one. J. L. Austin, lecturing at Harvard in 1955 and published posthumously in 1962, called these "performative" utterances: words that perform actions. The discovery is that even descriptive sentences — "the cat is on the mat" — are doing something: asserting, claiming, stating. So language is not just a map of reality. It is also a kind of action.

Austin then built a three-layer analysis. The locutionary act is saying the words with their ordinary meaning. The illocutionary act is what you do in saying them: assert, promise, order, apologise, warn. The perlocutionary act is the effect you have on the hearer: persuade, frighten, amuse. A single utterance carries all three. "There is a bull in the field" is a locutionary act (words with sense and reference), an illocutionary act (a warning), and a perlocutionary act (it gets you to leave). The middle layer, the illocutionary, is where speech act theory lives.

Two extensions opened the field. John Searle sorted illocutionary acts into five families: assertives (state facts), directives (request or order), commissives (commit the speaker), expressives (express a feeling), and declaratives (change the world by being uttered). Paul Grice then asked how speakers mean more than they say. His Cooperative Principle and four maxims — be informative, truthful, relevant, brief — explain why "Can you pass the salt?" works as a request even though its literal form is a yes-or-no question. Speech act theory exists because meaning and action in language cannot be pulled apart.

Visual Beginner

The diagram tracks the central lineage of speech act theory across four nodes. The first is Austin's three-layer analysis: a single utterance is at once locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. The second is the set of felicity conditions that an illocution must satisfy to count as performed: appropriate speaker, conventional procedure, appropriate circumstances, sincerity, follow-through. The third is Searle's five-way taxonomy of illocutionary acts. The fourth is Grice's Cooperative Principle and its four maxims, which feed Searle's account of indirect speech acts. An arrow from Grice back to Searle marks the inference route by which an utterance whose literal form is one kind of act (a question) is recognised as another (a request).

The picture shows that speech act theory is a stack: locution and illocution sit at the bottom, felicity conditions hold the stack up, and Grice's maxims sit above, feeding the indirect layer where most real conversation lives.

Worked example Beginner

A sentence whose grammatical form and its actual function come apart. Take "Can you pass the salt?" at a dinner table.

Step 1. The literal form is a yes-or-no question about the hearer's ability to pass the salt. A perfectly grammatical answer is "Yes," followed by silence.

Step 2. Nobody hears it that way. The hearer reaches for the salt, or apologises and explains why not. The question functions as a request, not as a query about ability.

Step 3. Searle (1975) reconstructs the inference. The hearer assumes the speaker is following Grice's Cooperative Principle, in particular the maxim of Relation (be relevant). A literal question about salt-passing ability at dinner is irrelevant; the speaker must mean something else. The chain runs from ability, through relevance, to request.

Step 4. The chain is fragile. "Can you tap-dance?" does not work as a request at dinner, because tap-dancing bears no relevant relation to the meal. The inference route that turned the salt-question into a request is absent here, so the literal reading stands.

What this tells us: indirect speech acts — requests via questions, refusals via assertions, warnings via questions — are everywhere in ordinary talk, and they work because speakers and hearers share a background of conversational norms.

Check your understanding Beginner

Exercise (easy, multiple choice).

A performative utterance, in Austin's sense, is one that:

A. Reports an action the speaker has already completed B. Performs the very action it appears to describe C. Asks a question about an action D. Describes a habit the speaker has

Hint

A judge saying "I sentence you to ten years" is not describing a sentencing that already happened.

Answer

B. A performative utterance performs the act it appears to name. The judge's sentence, the promise "I promise to pay you back," and the apology "I apologise" are Austin's paradigm cases: the utterance does not report an independently existing fact; it brings the act into being. Feedback-correct: the words are themselves the act. Feedback-wrong: reports, questions, and habits do not create the act they mention.

Exercise (easy, multiple choice).

Which of Grice's four maxims does the utterance "A is a fine friend" most plausibly appear to violate, in a context where the speaker intends to imply that A has just betrayed them?

A. Quantity (be informative) B. Quality (be truthful) C. Relation (be relevant) D. Manner (be brief and orderly)

Hint

The speaker says something the hearer will recognise as the opposite of the truth, prompting an inference to the intended implicature.

Answer

B. Quality. The utterance appears to flout the maxim of Quality (be truthful): the hearer assumes the speaker is competent and cooperative, so the obvious untruth triggers the inference that the speaker means the opposite. Grice's name for this kind of meaning-beyond-the-literal is conversational implicature. Feedback-correct: the implicature is computed by assuming the speaker is still cooperating, only via apparent violation. Feedback-wrong: Quantity, Relation, and Manner flouts license different inferences (over- or under-informativeness, irrelevance, obscurity).

Formal definition Intermediate+

Speech act theory analyses an utterance as a structured action rather than as a bare sequence of words. Following Austin ^{[Austin 1962]} and Searle ^{[Searle 1969]}, the central notions are:

Locutionary act. The act of producing a sentence with a determinate sense and reference; the level at which phonetics, syntax, and propositional content are fixed.
Illocutionary act. The act performed in saying the words: asserting, promising, ordering, apologising, warning. The illocutionary act has a characteristic force (assertive, directive, commissive, expressive, declarative) in addition to its propositional content.
Perlocutionary act. The effect the utterance brings about by being said: persuading, frightening, amusing, inspiring. Perlocutionary effects are causal consequences of the illocution and need not be conventionally secured.
Felicity conditions. The conditions under which an illocutionary act succeeds. Austin's catalogue includes: an accepted conventional procedure, appropriate persons and circumstances, correct and complete execution, and sincere, sustained follow-through. Searle recast these as constitutive rules: rules that create the activity (the rules of promising), as opposed to regulative rules, which govern a pre-existing activity (the rules of etiquette at table).

The Grice layer adds the inferential apparatus that turns a bare utterance into an act whose intended force the hearer recovers:

Cooperative Principle (Grice). The tacit norm that one's conversational contribution is appropriate to the accepted purpose of the exchange. Its four maxims are Quantity (be as informative as required, no more), Quality (be truthful, avoid the unsupported), Relation (be relevant), and Manner (be clear, brief, orderly) ^{[Grice 1967]}.
Conversational implicature. What a speaker means, over and above what is literally said, by appearing to depart from a maxim while still being presumed cooperative.
Indirect speech act. An utterance whose grammatical form belongs to one illocutionary type (a question) but whose intended force belongs to another (a request). The hearer recovers the intended force through Gricean reasoning ^{[Searle 1975]}.

Let $u$ be an utterance with propositional content $p$ and illocutionary force $F$ . Then $u = F (p)$ , where $F$ ranges over the assertive, directive, commissive, expressive, and declarative families. The same content $p$ can be carried by different forces: $p$ can be asserted ("the door is open"), questioned ("is the door open?"), ordered ("open the door!"), or hypothesised ("suppose the door were open"). The force-content decomposition is the load-bearing structural insight of speech act theory.

Counterexamples to common slips Intermediate+

Performatives are not the same as commands. A performative ("I hereby promise") creates an act by being uttered; a command ("close the door") directs another to act. The grammatical mood of a performative is typically first-person singular present indicative active with "hereby"; commands are typically second-person imperative.
Implicature is not implication. Logical implication is a relation between propositions: $p ⊨ q$ . Implicature is a pragmatic inference about speaker meaning, cancellable without contradiction. "A is a fine friend, but I do not mean he betrayed me" cancels the implicature; " $p$ and not- $q$ " contradicts the implication.
Felicity conditions are not etiquette. Breaches of etiquette are socially awkward but the act is still performed. Breaches of felicity conditions (a passerby "sentencing" a stranger) mean the act was not performed at all — there is no sentencing to apologise for.
Searle's taxonomy is not the only one. Bach and Harnish (1979) propose four families rather than five; Vanderveken (1990) refines Searle's classes into a formal algebra; the boundary between commissives and directives, in particular, is disputed.
Indirect speech acts are not rare. "Can you...?", "Would you...?", "I wonder if...", "It's cold in here" (as a request to close the window) are the dominant patterns of polite adult conversation; purely literal direct speech acts are the marked case.

Key argument: Austin's collapse of the constative/performative distinction Intermediate+

Argument (Austin 1962, Lectures III-VIII). The constative/performative distinction was supposed to separate two kinds of utterance: constatives, which describe the world and are assessed as true or false; performatives, which act on the world and are assessed as happy (felicitous) or unhappy (infelicitous). The distinction collapses under examination, and what survives is the unified category of the illocutionary act.

Reconstruction. The argument runs in four steps.

Performatives can be true or false. "I promise to be there" is true iff I have promised, and I have promised by uttering it. The truth-predicate that was supposed to mark constatives alone applies to performatives too, once we read the performative as reporting the act it performs.
Constatives can be happy or unhappy. "The cat is on the mat" requires an appropriate context — a particular cat, a particular mat, a speaker in a position to know — to count as a successful assertion. Insincerity, presupposition failure, and lack of standing produce the same kinds of failure Austin had isolated for performatives. The felicity-predicate that was supposed to mark performatives alone applies to constatives too.
The two dimensions are present in every utterance. Since performatives admit of truth and constatives admit of felicity, neither dimension is exclusive to one class. Every utterance carries both an assessed-by-truth dimension and an assessed-by-felicity dimension.
The unifying category is the illocutionary act. What performatives and constatives share is that each is an act done in saying something: an act with force $F$ and content $p$ . The constative/performative distinction was a distinction between two illocutionary families (assertives vs commissives and declaratives) mistakenly projected onto utterances as such. Once the force-content analysis is in place, the apparent duality dissolves into the broader theory of illocutionary force.

The conclusion: all utterances are illocutionary acts. Language is, at its base, a form of action; description is one illocutionary family among others, not a separate category from action.

Bridge. The collapse builds toward 20.13.01 philosophy of mind, where intention and speaker meaning become the load-bearing notions, and appears again in 20.12.02 Frege-Russell reference theories as the pragmatic complement that semantics alone cannot supply: sense and reference fix what is said, but illocutionary force fixes what is done. The foundational reason the collapse works is that any attempt to draw a sharp line between describing and doing runs into the same phenomenon on both sides — the conditions under which an assertion is felicitous are exactly the conditions under which a performative is happy. This is exactly the structure that identifies assertion with one illocutionary family among others, and the bridge is from the question "is language descriptive or active?" to the answer "every utterance is both, under the force-content decomposition", with the illocutionary act as the load-bearing category. The pattern generalises across the philosophy of language — the assertive family that the constatives were supposed to occupy is one of five in Searle's 1976 taxonomy, the indirect layer that Grice and Searle added on top, the politeness-theoretic extensions of Brown-Levinson, and the relevance-theoretic reduction of Sperber-Wilson — and the central insight is that meaning and action in language cannot be pulled apart.

Exercises Intermediate+

Exercise 1 (easy, multiple choice).

The grammatical form of "I hereby pronounce you married" is:

A. Second-person imperative B. Third-person indicative C. First-person singular present indicative active, with "hereby" D. A bare interrogative

Hint

Austin's paradigm performatives share a canonical grammatical shape.

Answer

C. The canonical form of an explicit performative is first-person singular present indicative active with "hereby": "I hereby promise," "I hereby apologise," "I hereby pronounce you married." The "hereby" marks the utterance itself as the vehicle of the act. Feedback-correct: the form signals that the words are doing the act, not describing it. Feedback-wrong: imperatives direct another to act; third-person indicatives and interrogatives do not, by their form, create the acts they name.

Exercise 3 (medium, multiple choice).

A passerby on the street, not holding any office, shouts "I hereby sentence you to ten years!" at a stranger. On Austin's analysis, the utterance is:

A. A felicitous performative; the stranger is now sentenced B. An infelicitous performative; the felicity condition on appropriate speaker fails, so no sentencing occurred C. A constative that happens to be false D. A successful indirect speech act

Hint

A sentencing requires an authorised speaker operating within a conventional procedure.

Answer

B. The felicity conditions on a declarative sentencing include that the speaker hold the appropriate office (judge, magistrate) and operate within an accepted conventional procedure (a court, a trial). A passerby satisfies neither condition, so the performative is infelicitous: the act of sentencing was not performed. Feedback-correct: infelicity is not a minor social slip — the act simply does not take place. Feedback-wrong: the utterance is not a description that happens to be false, nor an indirect request; it is a defective attempt at a declarative.

Exercise 4 (medium, multiple choice).

Grice's maxim of Quantity instructs speakers to make their contribution as informative as is required. An utterance that flouts Quantity — say, replying "some" to "did you finish all the cookies?" — standardly generates the implicature that:

A. The speaker is lying B. The speaker ate only some (not all) of the cookies C. The speaker did not hear the question D. The speaker thinks cookies are unhealthy

Hint

If the speaker had eaten all of the cookies, "some" would have been less informative than required.

Answer

B. The hearer assumes the speaker is cooperating and therefore informative. If "yes, all" were true, the speaker would have said so. Saying only "some" therefore implicates "some but not all". This is the canonical Quantity-based implicature. Feedback-correct: the inference is generated by the hearer's preserving the assumption of cooperation in the face of an apparent under-informative contribution. Feedback-wrong: Quality-flouts trigger truth-related inferences, not informational ones; deafness and dietary opinions are conversationally beside the point.

Exercise 6 (medium, symbolic).

Reconstruct the Gricean inference by which "It's cold in here" (uttered to a roommate) is heard as a request to close the window. Set it out in premise-conclusion form.

Hint

Apply Relation (the utterance must be relevant) and the assumption that the speaker is cooperative.

Answer

(i) The speaker has asserted that the room is cold. (ii) The speaker is presumed to be following the Cooperative Principle, in particular Relation. (iii) A bare assertion about the room's temperature is relevant to a roommate only if it bears on some action the hearer can take. (iv) Closing the window is the standardly available action that responds to a cold room. (v) Therefore the speaker intends the hearer to close the window; the utterance is an indirect directive. The chain depends on the contextual availability of an action; without such an action the literal reading stands.

Exercise 7 (hard, short answer).

Searle (1969) distinguishes constitutive from regulative rules. Define each, explain why promising requires constitutive rules rather than regulative ones, and identify one consequence for the metaphysics of social institutions.

Hint

Constitutive rules create the activity they govern; regulative rules govern an activity that antecedently exists.

Answer

A regulative rule governs an antecedently existing activity: traffic rules regulate driving, which can be described independently of any rules. A constitutive rule creates the activity it governs: the rules of chess do not regulate a pre-existing activity of moving pieces on a board — they define what counts as chess, as checkmate, as castling. Promising requires constitutive rules because the act of promising does not exist independently of the convention that creates it: uttering "I promise to $ϕ$ " in the right circumstances counts as undertaking an obligation to $ϕ$ only because the constitutive rule of promising so defines it. The consequence is that social facts (promises, marriages, sentences, contracts) are made rather than discovered; the institutions in which they live (law, marriage, money) are constituted by systems of rules. This pattern underwrites the social ontology of Searle (1995), The Construction of Social Reality, on which brute facts (mountains, electrons) are independent of human convention while institutional facts (money, marriage) depend entirely on collective acceptance of constitutive rules.

Exercise 8 (hard, short answer).

Grice distinguished natural meaning from non-natural meaning (1957). Define each, give an example of each, and explain why the distinction matters for a theory of speaker meaning.

Hint

Natural meaning is evidence-bearing ("those clouds mean rain"); non-natural meaning is intentional ("that nod meant agreement").

Answer

Natural meaning is a relation between signs and what they signify in the natural world, where the sign is evidence for the signified: "those spots mean measles" (the spots cannot be present without the measles; the relation is not cancellable). Non-natural meaning — denoted $NN-meaning$ — is the meaning attached to an utterance by a speaker intending to produce a response in a hearer by means of the hearer's recognition of that very intention: "by that nod, she meant that she agreed" (the nod could have meant something else; the relation is cancellable and intention-dependent). The distinction matters because linguistic meaning is non-natural meaning: a speaker's uttering $u$ to mean $p$ consists in the speaker's intending the hearer to recognise, partly on the basis of the utterance, that the speaker intends to produce in the hearer the belief that $p$ . This reflexive intention-in-recognition structure, not any natural sign-relation, is what makes linguistic communication possible, and it grounds the Cooperative Principle and its maxims.

Interpretive debates Master

Result 1 (the constative/performative collapse). Austin's 1962 How to Do Things with Words (William James Lectures 1955) opens with a sharp division between constatives and performatives, then dissolves it: constatives admit of felicity assessments, performatives admit of truth assessments, and the unified residue is the illocutionary act, analysed as force plus content. The collapse is the load-bearing insight of the field; everything that follows presupposes it.

Result 2 (Searle's five-way taxonomy, 1976). Searle's Synthese paper partitions illocutionary acts into assertives (commit the speaker to the truth of $p$ ), directives (attempt to get the hearer to do $p$ ), commissives (commit the speaker to do $p$ ), expressives (express a psychological state about $p$ ), and declaratives (bring about $p$ by the utterance). The taxonomy is disciplined by the directions of fit between words and world: assertives word-to-world, directives and commissives world-to-word, declaratives both. Bach and Harnish (1979) contest the partition, arguing for four families on grounds that expressives collapse into assertives about the speaker's state; Searle and Vanderveken (1985) reply that the direction of fit distinguishes them.

Result 3 (constitutive rules and the analysis of promising, Searle 1969). Speech acts are made possible by constitutive rules — rules of the form "uttering $S$ in circumstances $C$ counts as undertaking obligation $O$ " — rather than by regulative rules governing a pre-existing activity. Searle's analysis of promising (1969, ch. 3) is the paradigm: the constitutive rule "any utterance $u$ that is a sincere, non-defective promise to $ϕ$ commits the speaker to $ϕ$ " is what makes a particular utterance a promise. The pattern extends to marrying, sentencing, contracting, and the rest of social ontology, developed in Searle (1995).

Result 4 (Grice's Cooperative Principle and the maxims, 1967). Grice's William James Lectures, published in parts from 1975 onward, formulate the Cooperative Principle and four maxims — Quantity, Quality, Relation, Manner — and the apparatus of conversational implicature: a speaker implicates $q$ when (i) the speaker has apparently flouted a maxim, (ii) the hearer assumes the speaker is still cooperating, and (iii) the hearer therefore infers that the speaker must have meant $q$ . The programme reduces a wide range of "what she meant but didn't say" phenomena to a small set of conversational norms.

Result 5 (indirect speech acts, Searle 1975). Searle's "Indirect Speech Acts" (1975) shows that the literal force of an utterance (a question about ability) and its intended force (a request to act) coexist, with the latter computed by Gricean reasoning over the former. The result explains why "Can you pass the salt?" is a request while "Can you tap-dance?" is not: only the former sits inside a relevance chain that the hearer can recover. The result is the load-bearing bridge between speech act theory and empirical pragmatics.

Result 6 (politeness theory, Brown-Levinson 1978/1987). Brown and Levinson's Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage recasts indirect speech acts as face-saving strategies: speakers use indirect forms because direct directives threaten the hearer's "face" (the public self-image), and indirect forms mitigate the threat. The framework predicts a cross-linguistic preference for indirectness in face-threatening contexts; empirical support is broad, though the claim of universality has been contested for cultures (East Asian, especially) where directness conventions differ.

Result 7 (Relevance Theory, Sperber-Wilson 1986). Sperber and Wilson's Relevance: Communication and Cognition proposes a single principle — that an utterance presumes its own optimal relevance — to replace Grice's four maxims. On their account, the hearer's inference to speaker meaning is governed by a cost-benefit balance between cognitive effort and contextual effect. Relevance Theory and Gricean pragmatics remain competing research programmes; both are live, and the field has not converged.

Result 8 (illocutionary logic, Vanderveken 1990-1991). Vanderveken's Meaning and Speech Acts formalises Searle's taxonomy into a many-sorted logic of illocutionary forces, with axioms governing the composition of force and content. The programme makes precise the algebraic structure of illocutionary acts; its relation to dynamic epistemic logic in the computational-linguistics tradition is the subject of ongoing work.

Synthesis. The constative/performative collapse builds toward 20.13.01 philosophy of mind, where intention and speaker meaning become the foundational notions of mental content, and appears again in 20.15.03 Husserl phenomenology, where the intentionality of consciousness is the structural ancestor of the illocutionary force-content distinction. The foundational reason these strands belong to one subject is that speaking is at once representing, acting, and intending; this is exactly why a philosophical account of language cannot stop at truth-conditions; putting these together, the bridge is from the constative/performative collapse to the unified category of illocutionary acts, on which Searle's taxonomy sorts the families, Grice's maxims explain the indirect layer, and Brown-Levinson and Sperber-Wilson extend the framework into politeness and relevance; the pattern generalises into law (contracts as commissives, statutes as declaratives, verdicts as assertives), into linguistics (pragmatics as a level of description distinct from syntax and semantics), and into computing (dialogue systems, plan-recognition, large language model inference), and the central insight is that meaning and action in language are two faces of the illocutionary act.

Full argument set Master

Proposition (the constative/performative collapse). Every utterance is an illocutionary act; the apparent distinction between truth-apt constatives and felicity-apt performatives collapses into a single theory of force-content acts.

Argument. (i) Suppose, with Austin, that constatives are utterances assessed by truth and performatives are utterances assessed by felicity. (ii) Performatives admit of truth: "I promise to be there" is true iff the speaker has thereby promised, which they have, by performing the act the utterance names. (iii) Constatives admit of felicity: "the cat is on the mat" is felicitous as an assertion only if there is an appropriate cat, an appropriate mat, and a speaker with the standing to assert it; the same kinds of failure (insincerity, presupposition failure, lack of standing) defeat constatives and performatives alike. (iv) Therefore neither truth nor felicity is exclusive to one class; every utterance carries both dimensions. (v) The unifying residue is the act done in saying something: an act with illocutionary force $F$ and propositional content $p$ . (vi) Hence every utterance is of the form $F (p)$ , and the constative/performative distinction is a distinction between illocutionary families (assertives vs commissives and declaratives) projected onto utterances as such. The collapse is established. $□$

Proposition (indirect directive via Quantity-flout, "some of the cookies"). An utterance of "some of the cookies are gone," in reply to "did you eat them all?", conversationally implicates that not all of the cookies are gone.

Argument. (i) The speaker has asserted "some of the cookies are gone." (ii) The hearer presumes the speaker is following the Cooperative Principle, in particular the maxim of Quantity (be as informative as required). (iii) "Some but not all" is more informative than "some," and the question made the stronger claim relevant. (iv) If the stronger claim ("some but not all" or "all") were true, the cooperative speaker would have said so. (v) The speaker said only "some," so the stronger claim must be unavailable: the speaker does not believe "all." (vi) By Quality (be truthful) and the presumption of competence, the speaker's believing "some but not all" is the best available explanation of the utterance. (vii) Hence the speaker implicates "some but not all". The implicature is cancellable: "some — in fact, all" cancels it without contradiction, which distinguishes implicature from logical implication. $□$

Connections Master

Philosophy of language survey — reference, meaning, and use 20.12.01. Speech act theory is the third strand of the philosophy of language developed in the chapter survey: sense and reference (Frege, Russell) handle what is said; direct reference (Kripke) handles how names hook onto bearers; speech acts (Austin, Searle, Grice) handle what utterances do. The survey unit's table of three questions — what does an expression pick out, how does it pick that out, what does the utterance do — frames this unit's contribution.
Frege, Russell, and theories of reference 20.12.02. The Frege-Russell reference tradition handles the propositional content of an utterance; speech act theory handles its illocutionary force. The two programmes are complementary rather than rivals: any complete theory of meaning requires both a semantics for content (sense, reference, intension) and a pragmatics for force (assertion, promise, order). The force-content decomposition $F (p)$ is the structural link between the two units.
Husserl's phenomenology — intentionality, reduction, transcendental consciousness 20.15.03. Husserl's analysis of intentionality — the directedness of consciousness toward an object — is the structural ancestor of the illocutionary force-content distinction. What the speaker intends (in the phenomenological sense) fixes the content toward which the illocutionary act is directed; the phenomenological tradition and the speech-act tradition share a common root in the Brentano-Husserl thesis that mental acts are characterised by their intentional object.
Philosophy of mind — consciousness, physicalism, and the mental 20.13.01. Speaker meaning and communicative intention are mental states; Grice's analysis of non-natural meaning in terms of complex reflexive intentions (the speaker intends the hearer to recognise the speaker's intention to produce a belief in the hearer) presupposes a philosophy of mind on which such intentions are well-defined. Speech act theory is thus a downstream application of the philosophy of mind rather than an alternative to it.

Historical & philosophical context Master

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations ^{[Wittgenstein 1953]}, published posthumously in 1953, dismantled the picture theory of meaning he had defended in the Tractatus (1921) and replaced it with the conception that "the meaning of a word is its use in the language" (Investigations §43). The slogan is explicitly hedged there — not for all words, not in all contexts — but it served as the foundation for the ordinary-language philosophy practised at Oxford in the 1940s and 1950s by Gilbert Ryle, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, and their students. The shift from meaning-as-truth-conditions to meaning-as-use is the historical condition for the rise of speech act theory.

J. L. Austin delivered the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1955 under the title Words and Deeds; the revised text was published posthumously as How to Do Things with Words ^{[Austin 1962]} in 1962, edited by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Austin's working method was to start from the surface grammar of ordinary English, draw a sharp distinction (constative vs performative), test the distinction against recalcitrant cases, and let the distinction collapse into a more general account. The three-layer locutionary/illocutionary/perlocutionary analysis of Lecture VIII is the residue of that collapse.

John Searle's Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language ^{[Searle 1969]} systematised Austin's programme. Searle's A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts ^{[Searle 1976]}, published in Synthese vol. 42, replaced Austin's less disciplined preliminary taxonomy with the five-family classification (assertives, directives, commissives, expressives, declaratives) that has dominated the field since. Searle's "Indirect Speech Acts" (1975) bridged the Austinian framework to Grice's emerging pragmatics.

H. P. Grice's William James Lectures, delivered at Harvard in 1967 and published in parts from 1975 onward as "Logic and Conversation" ^{[Grice 1967]}, supplied the inferential apparatus — the Cooperative Principle and the four maxims — that transformed speech act theory from a taxonomy of illocutionary types into a working theory of conversational inference. Grice's 1957 Philosophical Review paper "Meaning" had already separated natural from non-natural meaning and analysed the latter in terms of reflexive communicative intentions; the 1967 lectures extended that analysis into the pragmatics of conversation. Bach and Harnish's Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts (MIT, 1979) consolidated the synthesis; Brown and Levinson's Politeness (1978, reissued 1987) and Sperber and Wilson's Relevance (1986) opened the empirical-pragmatic and cognitive-pragmatic research programmes that remain live today.

Bibliography Master

Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Edited by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. (First published Oxford: Clarendon, 1962; based on the William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955.)

Bach, Kent, and Michael Harnish. Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979.

Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. (First published as part of Questions of Politeness, ed. Esther N. Goody, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.)

Grice, H. P. "Meaning." Philosophical Review 66, no. 3 (1957): 377–388.

Grice, H. P. "Logic and Conversation." In Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, edited by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 41–58. New York: Academic Press, 1975. (Based on the William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1967.)

Levinson, Stephen C. Pragmatics. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Especially ch. 3 (Conversational Implicature) and ch. 5 (Speech Acts).

Searle, John R. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Searle, John R. "Indirect Speech Acts." In Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, edited by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 59–82. New York: Academic Press, 1975.

Searle, John R. "A Classification of Illocutionary Acts." Language in Society 5, no. 1 (1976): 1–23. (A widely cited precursor to the Synthese taxonomy.)

Searle, John R. "A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts." In Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts, 1–29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. (Expanded from the 1976 Synthese paper.)

Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. (First edition 1986.)

Vanderveken, Daniel. Meaning and Speech Acts. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990–1991.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953. (German-English parallel text; the locus classicus of "meaning as use" at §43.)

Prerequisites

20.12.01

Tier anchors

beginner: Huang, Pragmatics (Oxford Introductions to Language Study), ch. on speech acts and implicature; accessible pragmatics intros
intermediate: Levinson, Pragmatics (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics, 1983), ch. 5 (speech acts) and ch. 3 (implicature); Bach and Harnish, Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts (MIT, 1979)
master: Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953); Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962, William James Lectures 1955); Searle, Speech Acts (1969); Searle, Indirect Speech Acts (1975); Searle, A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts (Synthese 1976); Grice, Meaning (Phil. Rev. 1957); Grice, Logic and Conversation (William James Lectures 1967, published 1975 in Syntax and Semantics 3); Bach and Harnish 1979; Brown and Levinson, Politeness (1978/1987); Sperber and Wilson, Relevance (1986); Vanderveken, Meaning and Speech Acts (1990-1991)

References

Wittgenstein — Philosophical Investigations · 1953, Basil Blackwell; Part I sections 7, 23, 43 (meaning as use, language games, the slogan and its hedge)
Austin — How to Do Things with Words · 1962, Oxford University Press (Clarendon); the posthumous edition of the 1955 William James Lectures, Lectures I-XXII, especially I-VIII on constative vs performative and its collapse, and VIII-XX on locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary acts
Searle — Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language · 1969, Cambridge University Press; ch. 2 on constitutive vs regulative rules, ch. 3 on the analysis of promising, ch. 6 on reference as a speech act
Searle — A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts · 1976, Synthese, vol. 42; the canonical five-way classification into assertives, directives, commissives, expressives, declaratives
Grice — Logic and Conversation · William James Lectures 1967; published 1975 in Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, pp. 41-58; the Cooperative Principle and the maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation, Manner
Bach and Harnish — Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts · 1979, MIT Press; the Speech Act Schema and the literal-communicative-inference reconstruction of illocutionary force
Sperber and Wilson — Relevance: Communication and Cognition · 1986 (2nd ed. 1995), Blackwell; the single principle of relevance as replacement for the Gricean maxims

Estimated time

beginner: 25m
intermediate: 50m
master: 85m