Speech Act

1. Speech acts and speech event

In attempting to express themselves, people do not only produce utterances containing grammatical structures and words, they perform actions via those utterances.

Actions performed via utterances are generally called speech acts and, in English, are commonly given more specific labels, such as apology, complaint, compliment, invitation, promise, or request.

The circumstances surrounding the utterances, including other utterances, are called the speech event.

2. Acts

The action performed by producing an utterance will consist of three related acts.

1.   Locutionary act: is the basic act of utterance or producing a meaningful linguistic expression.

2. Illocutionary act: mostly we don't just produce well-formed utterances with no purpose. We form an utterance with some kind of function in mind.

3. Perlocutionary act: we do not, of course, simply create an utterance with a function without intending it to have an effect.\

Q: How can speakers assume that the intended illocutionary force will be recognized by the hearer?

A: by considering two things: Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices and felicity conditions.

3. IFIDs

The most obvious device for indicating the illocutionary force (the Illocutionary Force Indicating Device, or IFID) is an expression of the type shown in [6] where there is a slot for a verb that explicitly names the illocutionary act being performed. Such a verb can be called a performative verb (Vp).

 1 (Vp) you that...

Speakers do not always 'perform' their speech acts so explicitly, but they sometimes describe the speech act being per formed.