The speech act

I begin by assuming that the semantic description of lexical items capable of functioning as predicates can be expressed as complex statements about properties of, changes in, or relations between entities of the following two sorts: (a) the entities that can serve as arguments in the predicate-argument constructions in which the given lexical item can figure, and (b) various aspects of the speech act itself. I shall deal with the concepts that appear to be necessary for identifying the role of the speech act in semantic theory.

The act of producing a linguistic utterance in ,a particular situation involves a speaker, an addressee, and a message. It is an act, furthermore, which occurs within a specific time-span, and it is one in which the participants are situated in particular places. Now the time during which a speech act is produced is a span, the participants in the speech act may be moving about during this span, and even the identity of the participants may change during the speech act; but for most purposes the participant-identity and the time-space coordinates of the speech act can be thought of as fixed points. In accepting this fiction, I commit myself to regarding sentences like (1) to (3) as somewhat pathological:

(1) I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to you.

(2) I want you to turn the corner. . .right. . .here!

(3) This won’t take long, did it?

The producer of a speech act will be called the locutionary source (LS), the addressee will be referred to as the locutionary target (LT)¹. The temporal and spatial coordinates of the speech act are the time of the locutionary act (TLA), the place of the locutionary source (PLS) and the place of the locutionary target (PLT).

There are certain verbs in English which refer to instances of speech acts other than the one which is being performed (e.g. say), and I shall refer to these as locutionary verbs. It is necessary to mention locutionary verbs now because we shall find that linguistic theory requires a distinction between the ‘ ultimate ’ speech act and speech acts described or referred to in a sentence. Thus in the linguistic description of some verbs reference is made to either the LS or the agent of a locutionary verb,² and these situations must be distinguished from those in which the reference is to the LS alone.

Words in English whose semantic descriptions require reference to some aspect of the locutionary act include here, this, note, today, come, and know. The word come,³ for example, can refer to movement toward either the PLA or the PLT at either TLA or the time-of-focus identified in the sentence. Thus in (4):

(4) He said that she would come to the office Thursday morning

it is understood that the office is the location of the LS or the LT either at TLA or on the said Thursday morning. Uses of the verb know allow the LT to infer the factuality of the proposition represented by a following that-clause. Thus, in sentence (5):

(5) She knows that her brother has resigned

it is understood that the LS at TLA presupposes the factuality of her brother’s resignation.

In the semantic description of some verbs reference is made either to the subject of the ‘ next locutionary verb up ’, or to the LS just in case the sentence contains no explicit locutionary verb. If we are to believe Ross (see note b below), the verb lurk requires of its subject that it be distinct from the subject of the first commanding locutionary verb. It may look, on just seeing sentences (6)-(7):

(6) He was lurking outside her window

(7) *1 was lurking outside her window

that what is required is simply non-identity with LS; but this is shown not to be so because of the acceptability of sentence (8):

(8) She said I had been lurking outside her window.

From these observations it follows that sentence (9) is ambiguous on whether or not the two pronouns he are coreferential, but sentence (10) requires the two he's to be different:

(9) He said he had been loitering outside her window.

(10)He said he had been lurking outside her window

There are apparently many speakers of English whose use of lurk fails to match the observations I have just reviewed; but for the remainder, this verb provides an example of the distinction we are after.

There is, then, a distinction in semantic descriptions of lexical items between references to properties of the higher clauses that contain them, on the one hand, and to features of or participants in the speech act itself on the other hand. The former situation falls within the area of ‘deep structure constraints’, but the latter requires the availability of concepts related to the speech act.⁴

¹ I have borrowed these terms from philosopher Richard Garner, to whom I am also indebted for a number of suggestions on the content and phrasing.

² The disjunction in this statement may be unnecessary if we accept John R. Ross’s arguments that declarative sentences have phonetically unrealized embedding sentences representable as something like I declare to you that. . . On Ross’s view every sentence contains at least one locutionary verb, so that the difference we are after is a difference betwreen references to the ‘ next higher ’ locutionary verb and reference to the ‘ highest ’ locutionary verbs. See John R. Ross, ‘ On declarative sentences’, to appear in R. A. Jacobs and P. S. Rosenbaum (eds.), Readings in English Transformational Grammar (1970), Blaisdell.

³ See Charles J. Fillmore, ‘ Deictic categories in the semantics of “come” ’, Foundations of Language, 1966, 11, 219-27.

⁴ There is an additional use of deictic words, and that is this: in a third person narrative, one can express one’s ‘ identification ’ with one of the characters in the narrative by letting that character be the focus of words that are primarily appropriate to hic-nunc-ego. Thus we may find in an exclusively third-person narrative a passage like (i)

(i) Here was where Francis had always hoped to be, and today was to mark for him the beginning of a new life

in which the words here and today refer to the place and time focused on in the narrative, not to the place and time associated with the author’s act of communication. In what might be referred to as the ‘ displaced ego ’ use of deictic words, the author has shown us that he has for the moment assumed Francis’s point of view.

I propose that a rather subtle test of psycho-sexual identity can be devised which makes use of a story in which two characters, one male and one female, do a lot of cross-visiting, but in their other activities do nothing that makes one of them clearly more lovable than the other. The subject’s task is to listen to the story and then retell it in his own words. The writer of the original story must not use the words come and go; but if the subject, in retelling the story, states, say, that Bill came to Mary's house (using came rather than went), this fact will reveal that he is experiencing the story from Mary’s point of view.