Meaning, form, and function

In using natural language, a speaker may accomplish such things as warning, surprising, insulting, going on record, inquiring, commanding, conjecturing, and so on through a vast repertoire of effects that language is uniquely suited to achieving. Some of these effects are intended, some unwitting; some are more or less automatically associated with certain utterance types, and others are very loosely connected with the form or the content of the uttered token. In this chapter we will consider the extent to which acts of speaking are tied to the grammatical structure of an individual language, or language in general, and examine various views as to the nature of this connection, their benefits and drawbacks.

Locutions, illocutions, and perlocutions

In a work of great influence, the philosopher John Austin (1962) distinguished among three types of act that are ordinarily performed by someone who produces an utterance: locutionary, perlocutionary, and illocutionary acts. Locutionary acts are, according to Austin, those acts that form the substance of speech – they are acts of making use of the grammar of the language, its phonology, syntax, and semantics. Perlocutionary acts are the by-products (hence per-) of speaking certain words in a particular context. Typically, the affected party is the person spoken to, who may be embarrassed, confused, or convinced by what has been said. Though it is usual to treat the aforementioned effects as exhausting the range of perlocutions (as in Davis 1976), for completeness we must also include among perlocutions those by-product effects of speech that are not visited upon the addressee, e.g. embarrassing oneself, or divulging a secret to an eavesdropper.