Direct and Indirect Speech Acts in English

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2. The Locutionary, Illocutionary and Perlocutionary Acts

The locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts are, in fact, three basic components with the help of which a speech act is formed. Leech (Leech, 1983: 199) briefly defines them like this:

locutionary act: performing an act of saying something

illocutionary act: performing an act in saying something

perlocutionary act: performing an act by saying something

The locutionary act can be viewed as a mere uttering of some words in certain language, while the illocutionary and perlocutionary acts convey a more complicated message for the hearer. An illocutionary act communicates the speaker’s intentions behind the locution and a perlocutionary act reveals the effect the speaker wants to exercise over the hearer.

This can be demonstrated on a simple example:
4. Would you close the door, please?
The surface form, and also the locutionary act, of this utterance is a question with a clear content (Close the door.) The illocutionary act conveys a request from the part of the speaker and the perlocutionary act expresses the speaker’s desire that the hearer should go and close the door.

But the individual elements cannot be always separated that easily. Bach and Harnish say that they are intimately related in a large measure (Bach and Harnish, 1979: 3). However, for better understanding of their function within a speech act, I am going to treat them individually first.

2.1. Locutionary Acts

This component of the speech act is probably the least ambiguous. Bach and Harnish (Bach and Harnish 1979: 19), commenting on Austin’s work, point out that Austin distinguishes three aspects of the locutionary act.

Austin claims that to say anything is:

always to perform the act of uttering certain noises (a phonetic act)
always to perform the act of uttering certain vocables or words ( a phatic act)
generally to perform the act of using that [sentence] or its constituents with a certain more or less definite ‘sense’ and a more or less definite ‘reference’, which together are equivalent to ‘meaning’ (rhetic act)

From this division it follows that the locutionary act comprises other three “sub-acts”: phonetic, phatic and rhetic. This distinction as well as the notion of locutionary act in general was often criticized by Austin’s followers. Searle even completely rejects Austin’s division and proposes his own instead (Searle, 1968: 405). Searle (Searle, 1968: 412) warns that Austin’s rhetic act is nothing else but a reformulated description of the illocutionary act and he therefore suggests another term, the so-called propositional act which expresses the proposition (a neutral phrase without illocutionary force). In other words, a proposition is the content of the utterance.

Wardhaugh offers this explanation. Propositional acts are those matters having to do with referring and predicating: we use language to refer to matters in the world and to make predictions about such matters (Wardhaugh, 1992: 285). Propositional acts cannot occur alone since the speech act would not be complete. The proposition is thus expressed in the performance of an illocutionary act. What is essential to note here is that not all illocutionary acts must necessarily have a proposition (utterances expressing states such as ‘Ouch!’ or ‘Damn!’ are “propositionless” as Searle observes (Searle 1976:30)). Having defined the proposition and propositional acts, Searle modifies Austin’s ideas and states that there are utterance acts (utterance acts are similar to Austin’s phonetic and phatic “sub-acts”, Searle (1976:24) defines them as mere uttering morphemes, words and sentences), propositional acts and illocutionary acts.

Utterance acts together with propositional acts are an inherent part of the theory of speech acts but what linguists concentrate on the most is undoubtedly the issue of illocutionary acts.

2.2. Illocutionary Acts

Illocutionary acts are considered the core of the theory of speech acts. As already suggested above, an illocutionary act is the action performed by the speaker in producing a given utterance. The illocutionary act is closely connected with speaker’s intentions, e.g. stating, questioning, promising, requesting, giving commands, threatening and many others. As Yule (Yule, 1996: 48) claims, the illocutionary act is thus performed via the communicative force of an utterance which is also generally known as illocutionary force of the utterance. Basically, the illocutionary act indicates how the whole utterance is to be taken in the conversation.

Sometimes it is not easy to determine what kind of illocutionary act the speaker performs. To hint his intentions and to show how the proposition should be taken the speaker uses many indications, ranging from the most obvious ones, such as unambiguous performative verbs, to the more opaque ones, among which mainly various paralinguistic features (stress, timbre and intonation) and word order should be mentioned. All these hints or let’s say factors influencing the meaning of the utterance are called Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices, or IFID as Yule, referring to previous Searle’ s work, calls them (Yule, 1996: 49).

In order to correctly decode the illocutionary act performed by the speaker, it is also necessary for the hearer to be acquainted with the context the speech act occurs in. Mey (Mey, 1993: 139) says that one should not believe a speech act to be taking place, before one has considered, or possibly created, the appropriate context.

Another important thing, which should not be forgotten while encoding or decoding speech acts, is that certain speech acts can be culture-specific and that is why they cannot be employed universally. Mey shows this on French and American conventions. He uses a French sentence to demonstrate the cultural differences.
5. Mais vous ne comperenez pas! (literally, ‘But you don’t understand!’)
While a Frenchman considers this sentence fully acceptable, an American could be offended if addressed in similar way as he could take it as a taunt aimed at the level of his comprehension or intelligence (Mey, 1993: 133). The interpretation of speech acts differs throughout the cultures and the illocutionary act performed by the speaker can be easily misinterpreted by a member of different cultural background.

From this it also follows that ‘the illocutionary speech act is communicatively successful only if the speaker’s illocutionary intention is recognized by the hearer. These intentions are essentially communicative because the fulfillement of illocutionary intentions consists in hearer’s understanding. Not only are such intentions reflexive. Their fulfillment consists in their recognition’(Bach and Harnish, 1979: 15).

Nevertheless, as already pointed out in the previous example, there are cases when the hearer fails to recognize the speaker’s intentions and he therefore wrongly interprets the speaker’s utterance. This misunderstanding may lead to funny situations and hence it is often an unfailing source for various jokes.

I have chosen one illustrative example to comment on a bit more.

Figure 1. ^³
This picture suggests that the speaker (the man in this case) has uttered a question asking how the woman’s day was. The context and other circumstances are not specified, but let’s suppose that their conversation takes place somewhere in the office and that they are colleagues. The man obviously meant his question just as a polite conventional formula with a rather phatic function, not wanting to know any other details. The woman takes him aback a bit since she starts giving him a lot of unsolicited information. She obviously did not catch the intentions behind his words and therefore the man, surprised at her extensive answer, carefully reminds her that she was only supposed to say ‘Fine.’ The communication is uncomfortable for him. The illocutionary act he uttered was not recognized by the woman. The question we should logically ask is ‘Why?’.

Talbot (1998: 140) declares that men and women happen to have different interactional styles and misunderstandings occur because they are not aware of them. She even compares the differences in the way men and women talk to already discussed cross-cultural differences. And thus it is possible to see this example as an analogy to that French-American interpretation of the ‘Mais vous ne comperenez pas!’ case. The woman is as if from different cultural milieu and she therefore misinterprets the man’s question.

It should be clear by now that the issue of illocutionary acts is sometimes quite complicated because one and the same utterance can have more illocutionary forces (meanings) depending on the IFIDs, the context, the conventions and other factors.
6. The door is there.
This simple declarative sentence (6) in the form of statement can be interpreted in at least two ways. It can be either understood literally as a reply to the question ‘Where is the way out?’ or possibly ‘Where is the door?’ or it can be taken as an indirect request to ask somebody to leave. The sentence has thus two illocutionary forces which, even if they are different, have a common proposition (content). The former case is called a direct speech act, the latter an indirect speech act. It depends on the speaker and on the contextual situation which one he will choose to convey in his speech.

Similarly, one illocutionary act can have more utterance acts (or locutionary acts according to Austin) as in:

7. a. Can you close the door?

b. Will you close the door?

c. Could you close the door?

d. Would you close the door?

e. Can’t you close the door?

f. Won’t you close the door? (Hernandez, 2002: 262)

All the utterances in (7) are indirect requests, they all have a common illocutionary force, that of requesting.

There are hundreds or thousands of illocutionary acts and that is why, for better understanding and orientation, some linguists proposed their classification. The classification which is the most cited in the linguistic literature is that of Searle who divides illocutionary (speech) acts into five major categories (to define them, I will use Levinson’s explanations (Levinson, )):

Representatives are such utterances which commit the hearer to the truth of the expressed proposition (e.g. asserting, concluding)

8. The name of the British queen is Elizabeth.

Directives are attempts by the speaker to get the addressee to do something (e.g. ordering, requesting)

9. Would you make me a cup of tea?

Commissives commit the speaker to some future course of action (e.g. promising, offering)

10. I promise to come at eight and cook a nice dinner for you.

Expressives express a psychological state (e.g. thanking, congratulating)

11. Thank you for your kind offer.

Declarations effect immediate changes in the institutional state of affairs and which tend to rely on elaborate extra-linguistic institutions (e.g. christening, declaring war)

12. I bequeath all my property to my beloved fiancee.

Searle’s classification is not exhaustive and according to Levinson (Levinson, 1983: 240), it lacks a principled basis. Yet, Searle’s classification helped to become aware of basic types of illocutionary acts and their potential perlocutionary effect on the hearer.

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