SOSIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND LANGUAGE USE

THE THINGS WE DO WITH WORDS

Group 1 :

1. Fetty Alawyah
2. Luluk Mas’udah
3. Yusi Erin Lianawati
4. Ilham Tegar Prahara

ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

FAKULTAS TARBIYAH DAN ILMU KEGURUAN

INSTITUT AGAMA ISLAM NEGERI PEKALONGAN

2019
 INTRODUCTION

The speech act theory considers language as a sort of action rather than a
medium to convey and express. The contemporary Speech act theory deveded by J. L.
Austin a British philosopher of languages, he introduced this theory in 1975 in his
well-known book of ‘How do things with words’. Later John Searle brought the
aspects of theory into much higher dimensions. This theory is often used in the field
of philosophy of languages. Austin is the one who came up with the findings that
people not only uses that language to assert things but also to do things. And people
who followed him went to greater depths based on this point.

A. John Austin and The Development of Speech Act theory

This concept was proposed by John Langshaw Austin in 1962 one of
the founders of praghmatic and later developed by John R. Searle in 1969,
both philosophers of language, they believe that language are not only used to
inform or to perform acts. In other words actions performed via utterances are
generally called specch act.

Have you ever heard the word promise, command, suggest,

advise, congratulate ? Can you see the particular action done by someone to
refer to those? How is the form movement of the body? Can you imagine how
the action represented by those words look like? Those words are called
speech acts, that is language as action, which means by uttering the word you
do the action, you are not just saying something but are actually doing
something. If you say “get out of here!” actually you do command action, or
“you should do this instead of that.” By uttering that sentence you perform an
action that is suggesting, or etc.
It is important to note that the utterance sentence category that can be used to
refer to speech act must be performative utterance/sentence.

Performative is a sentence which does not describe nor affirm about

fact but contains a felicity condition, that is a certain condition that have to be
fulfilled when the perform takes place. a.

Performatives As Austin defines it, Performatives are those sentences

that denote an action. When the interlocutor wants his listener or reader to
perform an action, he just uses certain words in a certain context that direct
the other party to perform that intended action (Huang 95). In that
 case, Austin uses the expression "felicity conditions". These are the set of
rules under which an utterance would be governed as performative. These
conditions are:

Those performatives should be based upon convention.

The speaker should have the authority to perform that action.

The intention should be understood by the hearer.

The procedure must be executed (i) correctly and (ii) completely."

The utterance should reveal clearly its consequences.

He says also that if any of those conditions is not applied, then the
performatives would be infelicitous (Huang 99).

1. . Explicit performatives

Performatives could be further classified into explicit and implicit.

Explicit performatives usually contain a performative verb which is apparent
to the other party. It bears a clear cut meaning. In the utterance; "I promise to
study," there is a clear performative verb which is "promise". The utterance
in that case should be declarative. Its subject should be in the first person
pronoun with an active, present simple verb. Yet, this rule has some
exceptions as in "Passengers are requested to cross the railway line…." Here
the subject of the utterance is plural, and the verb is in the passive mode, in
spite of the fact that this is a performative utterance. In addition, these rules
may be applied to constatives, as in "I promise to be there". Here, the speaker
is just addressing himself (Lyons 728&729).

2. Implicit performatives

Unlike the explicit performatives, implicit performativs do not contain

a performative verb. The only way to understand that this is a performative
utterance is by realizing the real intention behind that utterance. Here the
context plays an important role in determining the intention of the interlocutor
because the utterance does not bear a cut clear meaning as in the explicit
performatives (Lyons 728&729).
3. Constatives

These are certain utterances which do not denote an action. The do

not contain a performative verb that would direct the other party to perform an
action. As Austin says, these constatives are used only in descriptions and
assertions (HUANG 95). It is supposed that the proposed felicity conditions
could not be applied to constatives. However, Austin realized that constatives
might be performatives. For example, somebody may say that "the
windowwindow is open". The utterance here might be directive as the
interlocutor wants the window to get closed. In that case, the constative
utterance is classified as implicit performative for the performative verb is not
clear. From those examples, it is found that the distinction between
constatives and performatives is not that clear. They might be overlapped.
Thus, Austin shifts to another classification, as he differentiates between
locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary actions (Lyons 730).

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 'apakabarpak?'
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.
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.
 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.
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).

Speech act theory provides an account of language use as intentional

action. That is, speakers, in performing an illocutionary act, are trying to do
things with their words. An early and important paper outlining an intentional
view of communication was published by the philosopher Grice in 1957 (see
also Grice, 1989). In this paper, he made an important distinction between
signs and signals.

Sign: Signs convey information, but a recognition of that information

does not require a recognition of the speaker’s intention to have that
information recognized.

Example: if I start to fall asleep in the evening, my family may infer

that I am tired. My falling asleep means that I am tired, but I am not intending
them to recognize this by virtue of my falling asleep.

Signals: convey nonnatural meaning (or meaning-nn) and are

communicative acts that achieve their ends by virtue of the hearer recognizing
the speaker’s intention to achieve those ends. In other words, the hearer’s
recognition of the speaker’s intention fulfills the intention. If I say to my
family that I’m really tired, I mean for them to recognize that I intend for
them to believe that I am tired. Their recognition of my intention fulfills that
intention.

so that the purpose of our conversation is clearly conveyed, we must

choose the appropriate expression, because our utterances can have numerous
effects above and beyond what we intend. There are:

 Llocutionary: speech act that states something in the sense of "saying"

 Illocutionary: take action by saying something.
 Perlocutionary: the effects the utterance has on the recipient

The perlocutionary-illocutionary distinction is an important one (although not

without some problems). It is clearly important to distinguish between what a
 speaker intends to communicate with an utterance and what effects that
utterance has on the hearer. Obviously a speaker’s intention and its effect on
the hearer are not completely independent; some perlocutionary effects are
tied to the illocutionary act, and the illocutionary act can be viewed as a
means of achieving a particular goal (a perlocutionary effect). For example,
we generally perform a request (an illocutionary act) with the goal of getting
the addressee to perform the requested act (a perlocutionary effect). But we
may have additional goals. We may, for example, attempt to make the request
politely so as to avoid offending the recipient, and the recipient’s recognition
of this conveyed politeness can also be regarded as a perlocutionary effect.

At the same time, some perlocutionary effects may be unintended because an

utterance can yield a wide variety of inferences and emotional reactions. The
recipient of a request may feel put upon, used, angry, frustrated, and so on.
And these effects might be quite idiosyncratic. This is why deconstructionists
argue that the interpretation of a text is largely independent of the author’s
intention in producing that text.One problem with the perlocutionary-
illocutionary distinction is that certain illocutionary verbs do not seem to be
characterizable in terms of a reflexive intention. One obvious example in this
regard is “brag.” If I want to successfully brag, I do not want my audience to
recognize my intention to brag. This is similar to what Jones (1964) referred
to as the ingratiator’s dilemma. We sometimes intend to perform acts such as
bragging, being ingratiating, and so on. But our success at performing these
acts depends on others not recognizing our intention to perform them.

B. Speech Act Taxonomy and Felicity Conditions

Classification of speech act
 Declaration : changes the state of the world in an immediate way
 Expressives : expresshow the speaker feels about the situation
 Directive :makes the addressee perform an action
 Commissives : commits the speaker to do something in the future
 Assertive : its function is to tell what the speaker knows or believe
Speech act type Direction of fit S = speaker
X=situation
Declarations Words change S causes X
theworld
Expressives Make words fit the S feels X
world
Directive Make the world fit S wants X
words
Commisives Make the world S intends X
 fitwords
Assertive Make words fit the S believes X
world

Felicity Conditions

Felicity conditions are conditions that must be in place and are criteria
that must be satisfied for an utterance or speech act to achieve its purpose. If
these conditions are not met,the speech act will not be succesful.
Etymologically felicity condition introduced by oxford philosopher J.L.
Austin in how to do things with words (1962) and futhers develoment by
American philosophy J.R. Searle.
 Felicity conditions for request
Searle (1962) Has set some more detailed rules concerning felicity
condition fo9r each illocutionaryacts. I9n his accordance, several conditions
have to be fulfilled for a sentence to be felicitious. These rules mostly
regarding with psychological and the beliefs of the speaker or hearer and each
one of them has to be fulfilled in order to create a felicitous act. These rules
are prepositional content,preparatory condition,sincerity condition and
essential condition as explained in the following :
1) Prepositional content : preositional content condition explains about
the illocutionary forces specify the acceptable conditions regarding
with preositional content. In other words,it is the proposed condition
of the speaker or hearer.
2) Preparatory condition : in attempt to conduct a felicitous illocutionary
act the speaker has to have a certain beliefs about the speaker’s act
and conditions and also the speaker is required to have the power of
authority over the hearer
3) Sincerity condition : in performing felicitous act the performer must
have a certain psychological attitude concerning the preositional
content of the utterance. For example when a person is making a
promise,he/she must have an intention of keeping it
4) Essential condition : essential condition of an utterance has to do with
its intention to get the hearer to perform the intended act.
C. Recognizing Illocutionary Force: how do people know what other are doing
with words?

If language use is action, how do we recognize what action is being

performed with an utterance? Do we even need to recognize it? And what
does it mean that a specific action is recognized as having been performed?
One might think these questions trivial and obvious; we generally seem to
know, quickly and without reflection, what people are doing with their words.
But these questions are far from trivial; this issue is a tremendously difficult
and thorny one for language researchers across a wide variety of disciplines.
For Austin (1962), the recognition of illocutionary force was largely
conventional and based on the performative verb, along with sentence mood
and type. A performative verb (when used in the first-person singular in the
predicate of the main clause of the sentence) names the action that it performs.
In uttering “I promise to do it,” the performative verb promise names the act
(promising) that is performed. Performative verbs, then, represent a universe
of possible illocutionary acts, and it is important to understand them and their
properties as a means of understanding what it is that people do with words.
In this regard, it is interesting to note that the set of performative verbs varies
among cultures. This is because many performative verbs (especially
declaratives such as christening, declaring war, etc.) are constituted by the
existence of certain cultural institutions, and because those institutions vary
among cultures, words (and the actions they perform) that make sense in one
culture may not make sense in another culture (see chap. 6 for further
discussion). If people do recognize illocutionary force when comprehending
an utterance.(an issue that is far from settled—see the following), what is the
nature of that recognition? One possibility is that recognition of illocutionary
force is componential. That is, because illocutionary force is determined by a
small set of conditions (the felicity conditions along with a few others), then
comprehension might include recognition of those conditions. In this view,
the comprehension of a request would involve a recognition of the speaker’s
desirethat an act be performed (the sincerity condition), her belief in the
hearer’s ability to perform the act (a preparatory condition), and so on. AThis
componential view of speech act meaning has received some limited
empirical support. Using sentence verification (Experiment 1) and reading
time (Experiment 2) procedures, Amrhein (1992) found convincing evidence
 that variations in the polarity of two components—speaker ability and speaker
desire—underlie the comprehension of four quasi-performative commissive
verbs (promise, hope, guess, agree). For example, the comprehension of
“promise” entails recognition of the speaker’s desire and ability, “hope”
entails recognition of the speaker’s desire but not his ability, “agree” entails
the reverse, and “guess” entails neither. In addition, in these studies the degree
of speaker committedness (similar to strength of illocutionary force) was
largely accounted for by the combination of these intentions. Components of
intentions—such as ability and desire—are fundamental features of social
action, and it makes sense that interlocutors would orient to them (e.g.,
Heider, 1958).

Still, the exact nature of the comprehension of illocutionary force and

whether illocutionary force is even recognized is not clear. Surprisingly, there
has been little psycholinguistic research on this issue. This is a particularly
important problem because many times illocutionary force is not specifically
named with a performative verb, as was the case with the sentences used in
Amrhein’s (1992) experiments. Instead, most of the time the performative is
implicit. For example, “I’ll be there without fail” or “I’ll clean it tomorrow, I
guarantee it” would, in most contexts, function as promises, yet neither
contain the performative verb “promise.” Does comprehension of these
utterances involve activation of the implicit performative verb “promise,” and
if so, how does this occur? Regarding the former question, there is some
evidence that implicit performative verbs are activated during comprehension
and do form part of the comprehender’s representation of the remark
(Holtgraves & Ashley, 2001). Regarding the second question, Austin, Searle,
and others have suggested that intonation, the context, and background
knowledge all contribute in various ways to the recognition of illocutionary
force. But this tells us very little about how this is accomplished.

D. Indirect Speech

In speech act terminology, the intended illocutionary point is often

different from the literal illocutionary point. This can be seen quite clearly
with requests. For example, the remark “It’s warm in here” has the literal
illocutionary point of an assertive, a statement about the way the world is. But
in many (though not all) contexts the intended illocutionary point is that of a
directive, an attempt to get the hearer to do something (e.g., open a window).
Many speech acts, such as requests, are almost always performed indirectly
(Ervin-Tripp, 1976). We rarely say to someone “Shut the door,” preferring
instead to make our requests indirectly with “Can you shut the door?” “Would
you mind shutting the door?” and so on. This presents something of a problem
for theories of language comprehension. Specifically, if illocutionary force is
often conveyed indirectly, how do hearers determine the intended
illocutionary force of a speaker’s remark?

Theory of using utterance in illocutionary force that implicite

 Grice (1975; Kunjana, 2007) in his article entitled "Logic and

Conversation" states that speech can imply propositions that are not part
of the speech. The propositions implied can be called conversational
implicatures. Implicit in conversations between the types of "mutual
agreement" between speakers and opponents, agreement in understanding,
discussed must be interconnected. Relationships or linkages themselves do
not exist in each speech. Asking, the meaning of the linkage was not
officially published in the statement. So, conversations that can be
translated with the meaning contained in the conversation that is discussed
by each participant.

But there are numerous ways in which people can perform indirect
speech acts, and many of them are not based (at least directly) on the
felicity conditions underlying the intended act. How, for example, does
one infer that “I’m thirsty” really means “Please get me something to
drink”? In these cases, it is not at all clear how a hearer determines the
intended speech act.