Abstract
Pragmatics of Speech Actions, the second of the nine self-contained volumes in Mouton’s Handbook of Pragmatics series, revisits Austin’s (1975 [1962]) claim to elucidate ‘the total speech act in the total speech situation’ (p. 148). With the focus on speech actions rather than acts, the editors attempt to broaden the traditional understanding of what people do with language, as well as with other semiotic resources. As Sbisà and Turner define them, actions are not limited to single acts, but may rather consist of a sequence of them. What this notion emphasizes is that the type of action being performed depends not only on the speaker’s intention, but also on the hearer’s perception and response, being negotiated and co-constructed between the interlocutors. Furthermore, actions can be performed with or without language. In other words, exploration of speech actions means a full consideration of the factors, whether psychological, cultural, or social, that constrain and condition the performance of speech acts.
This re-conceptualization of speech acts requires pragmatics to adopt a multi- and inter-disciplinary approach, embracing perspectives from philosophy, anthropology, sociology, ethnomethodology, sociolinguistics, neuroscience, psychology, semantics, grammar, and discourse analysis among others. The first of the two parts of the volume, ‘General issues’, provides readers with an overview of how central concepts, common to different types of speech actions, reflect this broadened paradigm. These classic notions are locution, illocution, perlocution (Chapter 1), speaker’s meaning (Chapter 2), implicature (Chapter 3), presupposition (Chapter 4), mitigation (Chapter 7), and power (Chapter 8). Apart from those concepts, this part also gives a brief account of how speech acts are classified (Chapter 5), how performatives are distinguished from constatives (Chapter 6), and how speech-act-theoretic notions are used in research on software agents (Chapter 9) and in linguistic anthropology (Chapter 10).
Part 2, ‘Varieties of speech actions’, offers a concise but comprehensive account of theoretical reviews and empirical studies of specific speech actions in specific situations. Most of the speech actions covered in these 12 chapters are illocutionary in nature, such as questioning (Chapter 13), requesting (Chapter 14), praising and blaming (Chapter 15), promising (Chapter 16), apologizing (Chapter 17), and complimenting (Chapter 18). Chapters 19 and 20 look at speech actions in ritual and legal contexts, respectively. While those illocutionary forces have undoubtedly been recognized as speech actions, the inclusion of reference and attention (Chapter 11) and the structuring of discourse (Chapter 22) in this part is innovative, as these acts are not considered in classic speech act theory. The conceptualization of assertions (Chapter 12) and silence (Chapter 21) as speech actions is even more radical: whereas assertions used to be regarded as constative utterances, silence was not even taken into any consideration in classic speech act theory.
In general, the book draws a vivid picture of how pragmatic concepts in the realm of speech act theory have been perceived and explored in different ways and, as a result, have developed in different directions over the past 50 years. In Chapter 10, for example, Richland explores how anthropologists criticize the ethnocentrism of classic speech act theory that places heavy emphasis on speaker’s intention rather than on the emergence of meaning in interaction. The author presents some counter-arguments by Rosaldo, Duranti, Ochs and Du Bois against Searle’s intentionality driven theory. These scholars all claim that meaning-making ‘has little or nothing to do with searching out the intentions of interlocutors’ (pp. 350–351); rather, meaning should be explicated in the process of negotiation and co-construction. Similarly, Oishi’s work on compliments in Chapter 17 compares the points of view of philosophers and sociologists regarding the conceptualization of speech acts. While philosophers tend to focus on normative aspects, sociologists tend to focus on interactive ones. Both the arguments against Searle’s intentionality in Chapter 10 and the sociologists’ viewpoint in Chapter 17 are valuable since they can explain the emergent co-construction of meaning when speech actions are explored in their ‘total speech situation’.
This multi- and inter-disciplinary nature of pragmatics is also demonstrated by the number of different methodologies drawn on to explore pragmatic phenomena. The book clearly presents some of the most frequently used techniques, such as corpus methods, discourse completion tasks, role-plays, interviews, and observation of naturally occurring data. The tools used to analyze those types of data are also very varied, ranging from descriptive statistics to conversation and discourse analysis. However, not all chapters, especially those on empirical studies in part 2, exploit the term speech actions in its full sense of talk-in-interaction. Although the editors reasonably admit that ‘there is too little empirical research on speech actions’ drawing on classic speech act theory (p. 5), the volume could have been even more valuable if it had encompassed more interactional empirical studies adopting related perspectives.
All in all, the volume provides a useful and engaging picture of how rapidly and diversely pragmatics has developed in the past few decades with a focus on speech actions in interaction. It is therefore a valuable source for teachers, lecturers, and developers of pragmatics courses. It can also be of great benefit to advanced undergraduates, post-graduates, and researchers not only in linguistics, but also in other disciplines interested in exploring speech actions in specific contexts of situation.