Linguistics
Speech Acts: An Essay in the Phi1osoph.v of
Language. JOHN R. SEARLE. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
vi + 203 pp., chart, figures, index. $8.50
(cloth).
Reviewed by MICHELLE Z . ROSALDO
Stanford University
In speaking, we do not simply say things
about the world we live in, but also act in it.
Our utterances are heard not as neutral
propositions but as socially situated activi-
ties-as commands, assertions, promises,
requests, or questionswhose meaning
depends on the relationships and intentions
of parties to a speech event.
That saying is often (and perhaps always)
a kind of doing, was suggested by Searle’s
teacher, J. L. Austin, in his book, How to
Do Things with Words (1962). Austin
isolated a class of verbs-like command,
accuse, promise, ask, name, request, and so
on-which, when used in the first person
singular present indicative, do not describe
but constitute an action, such that utter-
ances like “I name this boat the Queen
Elizabeth,” when spoken in the appropriate
context, count as doing just that. Such
verbs, called “performatives,” were seen as
specifying the “illocutionary” force of utter-
ances (what is being done in saying certain
things), and Austin went on to suggest that
even when explicit performative verbs are
absent, all speaking should be seen as
‘‘doing” and having “illocutionary force.”
To say “I do” is not to describe a marriage,
but to indulge in it. To say “it’s hot in
here,” involves a proposition about the
temperature, but it is also an act-a com-
plaint or an assertion or a request that
someone open the door. “Would you like
some tea?” can be heard as a question or an
offer; “I wish you’d stop that” may be a
request or a statement of desire. A first and
crucial import of these observations is that
all utterances necessarily have socially
situated implications, that “meaning” any-
thing in speaking involves intentions as to
stood. It would seem, then, that any analysis
of language must include an understanding
of the fact that it is used in socially
constituted acts of speech.
153
In Speech Acts, Searle provides an
incisive and suggestive account of the im-
plications of these observations for the
philosophy of language. Essentially, Searle’s
argument is that anything that can be
“meant” can be “said,” and potentially,
“undertsood,” by virtue of the fact that
language is rule-governed on at least three
levels. Any “sentence” can be analyzed as: (a)
an “utterance act” (a grammatical sequence
of “words”); (b) a “propositional act”
(involving “reference” and “predication”);
and (c) an “illocutionary act.” Illocutionary
acts depend upon, and color, propositions.
If, for example, a proposition predicates
“honesty” of “Mr. Nixon,” illocutionary
considerations may cast the issue as a ques-
tion (“Is Mr. Nixon honest?”), an assertion
(“Mr. Nixon is honest”), or a command
(“Mr. Nixon, be honest!”). Where linguists
and philosophers have conventionally
directed their attention to the rule-governed
properties of levels (a) and (b), Searle’s
concern is to demonstrate that “illocution”
is an orderly and rule-governed activity, and
that an understanding of the rules which
govern various modes of illocution com-
pletes and clarifies the analysis of grammar
and logic, or of utterance and propositional
acts.
In particular, Searle suggests that the
rules for any illocution will involve, in most
cases: (a) making an appropriate proposition
(e.g., in the case of promises, that something
will be done in the future); (b) fulfilling
certain preparatory conditions (e.g., that the
giver of a command is in a position of
authority, that a promiser proposes some-
thing which an addressee may find desira-
ble); (c) being sincere (e.g., wanting to know
the answer to a question, intending to fulfill
a promise); and (d) having one’s statement
“count as” accomplishing what is essential
to the particular act (e.g., undertaking an
obligation in the case of promises; requesting
information for a question).
Some rules, like the preparatory condi-
tion that what is said should not be what
participants take as obvious (e.g., we don’t
promise to eat at mealtimes unless it seems
questionable that we will) are likely to hold
for all successful illocutions; others, like the
rules for questioning, may specify speech
acts which can occur in all societies and all
154 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
contexts; and still others (the “essential”
conditions of a “promise”?) seem to be
limited to culture and context-specific acts
of speech. An interesting result of Searle’s
analysis is, then, that it suggests possibilities
for comparison, involving the specification
of rules appropriate to all varieties of illocu-
tion in natural conversation, and considera-
tions as to what sorts of combinations of
these rules become specified in particular
cultures and situations in conscious and
institutionalized expectations and in the use
of particular performative verbs. Further-
more, Searle’s analysis of speech acts has
immediate relevance for a number of issues
in philosophy and linguistics. For example,
in distinguishing the “illocutionary” and
“propositional” content of utterances, he
offers an alternative to the doctrine that
Meaning is Use-a doctrine which leads to
the suggestion that to call something “good”
means “to commend” it, or to say one
“knows” or “remembers” is to presuppose
the problematic status of what is known or
recalled. Searle’s alternative is to factor out
propositions which predicate “good,”
“know,” or “remember” (themselves simply
descriptive expressions) from the sorts of
speech acts (assertion, commendation) in
which they are commonly used. Finally,
Searle’s analysis is related to recent
proposals in Generative Semantics (e.g., Ross
1970; Gordon & Lakoff 1971) which claim
that any utterance has associated with its
logical structure an underlying performative
verb. Underlying performatives have
interesting relations to the surface structure
of sentencessuch that, for instance, to
assert a speaker-based condition on an illocu-
tion (“I want you to take out the garbage”)
or to question a hearer-based condition
(“Can you take out the garbage?”) can have
the same performative force (both are
requests).
Searle’s discussion is, then, wide in scope
and suggestive in its implications. At the
same time, it suffers the limitations of a
range of recent developments in linguistics
which attempt to characterize language by
attending to individual speakers’ intuitions
to the exclusion of the actual social use of
speech. So, for example, speech act theory
uses the idea of “illocutionary force,” or
“underlying performative” to attach gram-
matical strings (or “sentences”) to a social
context. Yet the proposal seems inadequate
[76,1974
in a number of respects. To begin, judgments
concerning the meaning and appropriateness
of particular illocutions are referred exclu-
sively to the presumed internal states and
dispositions of participants-their sincerity,
capacities, intentionsrather than to the
context at hand. But “Sincerity” is not, in
fact, dissociable from social context. If I feel
tired but say “fine” when someone asks me
“How are you?”, I may be answering ap-
propriately; the alternative, to say “lousy”
or “I’m tired,” may seem to be more
“honest,” but my choice of such an answer
is likely to have the consequence of focusing
the next few minutes’ discourse on my state
of health (cf. Sacks 1973). In other words,
the social meaning of my answer might be
better represented by attending to socially
structured strings of talk like “conversation-
al openings” (cf. Schegloff 1968) than to the
conditions on the performance of a “sincere
response.”
A second, and related problem, derives
from the philosopher’s attention to our
words for illocutionsquestion, answer,
promiserather than to regular features of
observed discourse. Searle isolates modes of
illocution by using the performative verbs of
English, and asking what conditions govern
the “literal” use of “I promise,” “question,”
and the like. While he is aware that such
verbs do not distinguish illocutions in the
same way in all languages, his method
depends on the assumption that they might.
Yet a number of considerations suggest
otherwise. For example, not all instances of
“questioning” are similar; to ask “How are
you?” at the beginning of an ordinary
conversation is hardly the same kind of
speech act as the same question uttered
when someone has just been hit by a car.
Again, explicit performative verbs (“I
promise,” “I command”) appear rarely in
informal discourse (even though we continu-
ally take on obligations and give orders), and
occur, instead, in relatively limited and
formal contexts (e.g., in instructing children,
or in courts of law), or in ironic and what
Searle would see as “derivative” sorts of use
(“I promise to fail you if you cheat on the
exam”). This suggests that the presence of
such verbs in any language depends on their
use in certain social institutions, rather than
on some natural propensity for our language
to provide us with methods of labeling the
things which we intend our utterances to do.
 LINGUISTICS
In short, it seems unlikely that the proposal
that we attach performative verbs to
sentences will go far in illuminating the social
organization of meaning in our talk.
Both t h e advantages and limitations of
Searle’s approach should, then, highlight a
number of issues of concern to anthro-
pologists. I t suggests, for instance, the
interest of comparative studies of the kinds
and uses of “performatives.” I t is also
relevant t o studies in semantics. On the one
hand, its insistance that all utterances have
illocutionary force presents a challenge t o
those who would base semantic accounts
solely o n the evidence of declarative
sentences (for example, the responses t o an
ethnoscientist’s “question frames”). On the
other, its proposal that “illocutionary” and
“propositional” acts can be analytically dis-
tinguished, points the way towards more
explicit accounts of the ways in which
“semantic representations” may be relatively
“context free.” Finally, the inadequacies of
a performative analysis of social meaning
highlight our need for studies of actual
interaction, and ultimately, for a “social
semantics,” for an understanding of language
which does justice t o the recognition by men
like Saussure and Durkheim-that language
is, primarily, a Social Fact.
References Cited
Austin, John L.
1962 How to Do Things with Words.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Gordon, D. and G. Lakoff
1971 Conversational Postulates. Papers
from the Seventh Regional Meeting of
the Chicago Linguistic Society. pp.
63-84.
Ross, John Robert
1970 On Declarative Sentences. In
Readings in English Transformational
Grammar. R. Jacobs, and P. Rosen-
baum, Eds. Waltham, MA: Ginn and
Company.
Sacks, Harvey
1973 Tout le Monde Doit Mentir. Com-
munications 20.
Schegloff, Emanuel A.
1968 Sequencing in Conversational
Openings. American Anthropologist
70:1075-1095.
Sign Language among North American In-
dians. GARRICK MALLERY. Foreword
by Thomas A. Sebeok. Articles by A. L.
155
Kroeber and C. F. Voegelin. Approaches
t o Semiotics series, 14. The Hague:
Mouton, 1972. xliii + 552 pp., figures,
illustrations, map. DG 76.00 (cloth). [Re-
printed from original, Sign Language
among North American Indians: Com-
pared with That among Other Peoples
and Deaf-Mutes, Smithsonian Institution,
Bureau of Ethnology, 1881.1
Reviewed by KEITH H. BASSO
University of Arizona
This monograph, which originally ap-
peared in 1881 as the 1st Annual Report of
the U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology, is a
lengthy, uneven, and loosely organized
treatise that explores the origins and devel-
opment of human systems of gestural
communication through an analysis of North
American Indian sign languages. It is a
pioneering effort in which D. Garrick
Mallery, a retired military officer turned
anthropologist, attempted to give scope and
direction to a fresh area of inquiry by
bringing together an enormous array of facts
and interpreting them according t o “avail-
able scientific theories and cautious objec-
tive reasoning.” In retrospect, it is apparent
that Mallery’s own common sense served
him more effectively than the science of his
day, for when he applies the ideas of leading
theorists-Darwin, Tylor, and Morgan, among
o t h e r s h e is led to commit some glaring
errors. On the other hand, when he rests
content with describing his data, assessing
their implications, and drawing conclusions
about them in the form of explicit hypo-
theses, he is both provocative and sound.
That Mallery made any positive contribu-
tions a t all is quite remarkable when one
considers the many misconceptions he held
about the world’s “savage races” and their
so-called “primitive languages.” As already
mentioned, some of these misconceptions
resulted from Mallery’s uncritical acceptance
of nineteenth century evolutionary doctrine;
others stemmed from the paucity of reliable
information available to him concerning
non-Indo-European languages, especially
those spoken by American Indians. Here are
two examples.
On the kinds of gestures employed by
non-literate man and animals:
The gestures of the lower tribes of men
may be generally classed under the