Pragmatic Acts Conclusion

Speech act theory is perhaps the most important theory in pragmatics. Those early pioneers, such as Austin, dissatisfied with limited semantic descriptions with their focus on propositions and truth conditionality, did much to galvanize the field of pragmatics. Austin is sometimes classified as an ordinary language philosopher, one of a group of scholars who thought that philosophy should not remain content with abstractions but consider those abstractions in the light of ordinary language usage. Attention to language usage is clearly evident in his work, both the use of formal features, such as performative verbs, and the social contexts within which they are used. However, one can immediately see a limitation, Austin considered the language around him and that language was English (and indeed limited to particular varieties of English). This fact was overlooked by subsequent researchers, who often assumed that Austin’s ideas were universal. Searle’s developments of Austin’s ideas pushed them towards formalization, but did not do so in the light of empirical study of speech acts across languages and cultures. We have repeatedly pointed out the cross-cultural variability in speech acts, both in terms of their pragmalinguistics and their sociopragmatics. This is not to say that those ideas are without value; indeed, they have enabled scholars to capture speech act aspects in various languages/cultures. Nevertheless, the traditional speech act theory that emerged was overly rigid, too narrowly focused, static and atomistic. In a nutshell, it is simply not up to the job of coping with speech acts, or rather pragmatic acts, in situated interactions.

Searle articulated the important notion of (in)directness with respect to speech acts, a notion that has been explored cross-culturally by later scholars. We have argued that (in)directness is a complex evaluation of speech activity, derived from a number of distinct bases, including the transparency of the illocutionary point, the target and the semantic content. Searle’s account of how (in)directness works relies too much on Gricean inferencing. Experimental evidence casts some doubt on whether literal meaning is accessed as a first step. Moreover, the role of associative inferencing, taking on board knowledge about the socio-cultural context, is again underplayed.

We suggested that schema theory (blended with prototype theory) provides a way of capturing pragmatic acts that allows them to be complex and fuzzy-edged. We also briefly noted alternative approaches to indirectness, one oriented towards cognitive science and the other to conversation analysis. We will elaborate on the fact that pragmatic acts depend not just on what one speaker has in mind but also on: (1) participant responses, with the consequence that they must be considered incremental, sequential and co-constructed; (2) the broader activity of which they are a part, with the consequence that they must be considered to be constrained by and constraining of that activity. In our final subsection, we introduced the notion of activity types, an especially useful notion for approaching pragmatic acts in a broader interactional perspective.