SPEECH ACTS THEORY

1. Language and action: Austin’s Theory of Speech Acts:

a. The distinction between the meaning of sentence (true or false) and

understanding what the sentence really means.

b. She tells about performative (action-completing) use of certain

formulas:

i. PASS (in mastermind) – it is not a true or false statement

about the world

1. It has narrow circumstances to say it

c. Locutionary act – uttering a sentence with a non-ambiguous

meaning (determinate sense)

i. It’s me again (the speaker was here before) – truth value

d. Illocutionary act – performing an act by uttering a sentence

i. It’s me again (intention of the speaker to apologize – no truth

value)

e. Perlocution – the effect the utterance might have

i. It’s me again (the effect of it is difficult to foresee – might

mollify the addressee, or make him angry)

INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS

2. Indirect speech acts:

a. It’s me again – an indirect utterance

b. When form of a sentence and function of the utterance don’t match,

then it is an INDIRECT SPEECH ACT:

i. I wonder when the train leaves (declarative form + question

function)

ii. Have a good journey (imperative form + assertion = I hope

you will have a good journey)
 iii. Tell me why you say that (imperative form + question
function)

c. Who likes fish?

i. Used as an indirect act asserts that no one likes fish

3. Direct speech act:

a. Can anyone do any better?

i. Interrogative form is used to ask a question – każdy zrozumie

to dosłownie I zareaguje odpowiednio

ii. However, it can also be understood indirectly – as indirect

request/invitaion/order

b. When form of a sentence (declarative/imperative/interrogative) and

function of the utterance (assertion.order/request/question)
matches, then it is a DIRECT SPEECH ACT:

i. Naturally, I hate music (declarative + assertion)

ii. Please turn the music down (imperative + order)

HISTORY OF WRITING

4. Early drawings made by the ancient were the basics for writing

a. Cave drawings (literal portrayals of aspects of life)

5. Pictograms evolved – a direct image of an object it represents

a. Non-arbitrary relationship between the picture and the object it

represents

b. They didn’t represent the sound of spoken language

c. It was found around African tribes, American Indians, Alaskan

Eskimos, Incas of Peru, people of Oceania.

d. They can be understood by anyone

 e. They could represent the attributes of the object they represent

i. Sun – meaning warmth, light, daytime etc.

6. e. represents Ideograms – representing ideas rather than objects

Later, the ideograms and pictograms were stylized, because the drawings
were poor and people could misunderstand them. They started to become
arbitrary signs (without knowing the system, you couldn’t understand the
sign), thus linguistic symbols

7. A symbol could stand for the a word in any language – Andre Eckardt and
Karel Johnson invented PICTO

a. Very simple sentences through words like “I have house in town/Ich

haben Haus in Stadt” (in every language)

8. SUMMERIAN WRITING SYSTEM

a. They lived 5000 years ago and they had the oldest writing system
(pictography)

i. Later they developed a cuneiform writing (pismo klinowe) – it

didn’t represent the object to which it referred

Later on Summerians were conquered by many nations, who

borrowed their writing system to their own languages and they used it to
represents sounds of the syllables in their languages:

a. Each syllable is represented by each symbol

Persians by the reign of Darius, were using writing system

representing syllables, not whole words.

9. REBUS PRINCIPLE

a. It is a representation of words or syllable by pictures of objects

whose names sound like the intended syllable. Thus the picture of
an eye may mean “eye” or “I”

10.HIEROGLYPHS
 a. Originally these were pictographs, but later it began to represent
syllables

b. It was borrowed by many civilizations, i.e. by Semitic people – they

invented West Semitic Syllabary (by 1500 B.C.) – a single symbol =
Consonant + following Vowel

11.PHOENICIANS

a. They first let one symbol stand for one consonant, then the Greeks
borrowed it for their language (however, Phoenicians had too much
consonants than Greek, and what was left started to represent
vowel sounds). First alphabetical system was invented

i. In alphabetical system each symbol represents each phoneme

b. Etruscans took the Greek alphabet, passed it to Romans, then

Christians passed it to many nations

c. The alphabet wasn’t invented – it was discovered

MODERN TYPES OF WRITING SYSTEMS

12.Word writing system

a. One written symbol represents one word or a morpheme.

b. Chinese writing has a system of characters – each represents the

meaning of the word, not the sound.

c. It can be understood in every part of China, or Arabic numerals in

every part of Europe, America etc.

13.Syllable writing

a. Japanese system

i. All words can be represented by 100 different syllables (CV-

type, consonant – vowel type)

ii. They have two syllabaries

1. 45 syllable letters + several diacritics for each

 a. Katakana – loan words

b. Hiragana – native words alone + Chinese words

iii. They borrowed the system from Chinese.

iv. Japanese is highly inflected

14.Alphabetic writing

a. They were invented on the basis of phonemic principle (one letter

represents a phoneme with allophones)

b. 12th century “The First Grammarian”, an Icelandic scholar, developed

an orthography taken from Latin

i. It was based on phonemic principles

1. he used minimal pairs to show distinctive contrast

2. for him, voiced units were allophones of voiceless ones

(/g/ for /k/ etc.)

c. Hankul (Korean alphabet) had 11 vowels and 17 consonants (a

phonetic alphabet) – each symbol represented some place of
articulation

i. /l/ and /r/ had one symbol – they were allophones of a one
phoneme

d. Alphabetic sounds ( reading ) ; alphabetic characters ( writing )

e. Most European languages make use of Latin characters (slight

differences exist)

i. Spanish added a ~ over the ‘n’, Germany added umlaut –

these are called diacritics

ii. Digraphs – sh / ch / ng – two characters representing one

sound

iii. Turkish, Indonesian and Swahili adopted Latin alphabet

f. Cyrillic is straightly derived from Greek, with no Latin.