Talk and Action

Indah FitriTiara Silalahi

Karisma AdityaNike

ChahyandarieYesicha Ryona

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Talk and Action

Speech Acts

Cooperation

Conversatio

n

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Talk and ActionIn speaking to one another, we make use of sentences, or, to be more precise, utterances.

We can attempt to classify these utterances in any one of a variety of ways.

We can try to classify them by length.

We can try to classify them by grammatical structure along a number of dimensions.

We may even try to work out a semantic or logical structure for each utterance.

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Talk and ActionAs soon as we look closely at conversation in general, we see that it involves much more than using language to state propositions or convey facts.

We also very rarely use language monologically and such uses are clearly marked.

The unmarked use is dialogical, i.e., with another or others in various kinds of verbal give-and-take which we call conversation

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Speech ActsOne thing that many utterances do is make

propositions: they do this mainly in the form of either statements or questions but other grammatical forms are also possible.

Such utterances are connected in some way with events or happenings in a possible world, i.e., one that can be experienced or imagined, a world in which such propositions can be said to be either true or false. They have been called constative utterances.

Austin (1975), a philosopher, distinguished still another kind of utterance from these, the performative utterance. In using a performative utterance, a person is not just saying something but is actually doing something if certain real-world conditions are met.

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Speech Acts Such utterances perform acts: the

naming of ships, marrying, and sentencing in these cases.

A speech act changes in some way the conditions that exist in the world. It does something, and it is not something that in itself is either true or false.

Truth and falsity may be claims made about its having been done, but they cannot be made about the actual doing.

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Speech Acts Austin pointed out that the ‘circumstances’

mentioned above can be prescribed. First, a conventional procedure must exist

for doing whatever is to be done, and that procedure must specify who must say and do what and in what circumstances.

Second, all participants must properly execute this procedure and carry it through to completion.

Finally, the necessary thoughts, feelings, and intentions must be present in all parties.

In general, the spoken part of the total act, the actual speech act, will take the grammatical form of having a first person subject and a verb in the present tense; it may or may not also include the word hereby.

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Speech ActsAustin divides performatives into five categories: (1) verdictives, verdict, estimate, grade, or appraisal

(‘We find the accused guilty’); (2) exercitives, the exercising of powers, rights, or

appointing, ordering, warning, or advising (‘I pronounce you husband and wife’);

(3) commissives, promising or undertaking, and committing one to do something by, (‘I hereby bequeath’);

(4) behabitives, apologizing, congratulating, blessing, cursing, or challenging (‘I apologize’); and

(5) expositives, a term used to refer to how one makes utterances fit into an argument or exposition (‘I argue,’ ‘I reply,’ or ‘I assume’).

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Speech ActsAccording to Searle (1969, pp.

23– 4), we perform different kinds of acts when we speak.

The utterances we use are locutions. Most locutions express some intent that a speaker has.

They are illocutionary acts and have an illocutionary force.

A speaker can also use different locutions to achieve the same illocutionary force or use one locution for many different purposes.

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Speech ActsIllocutions also often cause

listeners to do things. To that extent they are perlocutions.

If you say ‘I bet you a dollar he’ll win’ and I say ‘On,’ your illocutionary act of offering a bet has led to my perlocutionary uptake of accepting it.

The perlocutionary force of your words is to get me to bet, and you have succeeded.

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Speech ActsFor Searle there are five rules that govern promise-making :The first, the propositional content rule,

The second and third, the preparatory rules,

The fourth, the sincerity rule,

The fifth, the essential rule.

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Speech ActsThese kinds of conditions for

illocutionary acts resemble what have been called constitutive rules rather than regulative rules (Rawls, 1955).

Regulative rules are things like laws and regulations passed by governments and legislative bodies.

Constitutive rules, on the other hand, are like the rules of baseball, chess, or soccer

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CooperationWe can view utterances as acts of

various kinds and the exchanges of utterances that we call conversations as exchanges of acts, not just exchanges of words, although they are this too.

However, we may well ask how we can make such exchanges without achieving some prior agreement concerning the very principles of exchange. In fact, we do not.

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CooperationGrice (1975, p. 45) maintains that the overriding principle in conversation is one he calls the cooperative principle: ‘Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.’

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CooperationGrice lists four maxims that follow from the cooperative principle : quantity, requires you to make your

contribution as informative as is required. quality, requires you not to say what you

believe to be false or that for which you lack adequate evidence.

relation, the simple injunction: be relevant.

and manner, requires you to avoid obscurity of expression and ambiguity, and to be brief and orderly.

This principle and these maxims characterize ideal exchanges. Such exchanges would also observe certain other principles too, such as ‘Be polite.’

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ConversationSpeech can be planned or unplanned (Ochs, 1979).

We should note that a lot of speech has a certain amount of planning in it.

Unplanned speech is talk which is not thought out prior to its expression.

Unplanned speech has certain characteristics: • repetitions; • simple active sentences; • speaker and listener combining to construct

propositions; • stringing of clauses together with and or but

or the juxtapositioning of clauses with no overt links at all;

• deletion of subjects and referents; • and use of deictics.

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Conversation The syntax of unplanned conversation is also not at all that of formal, edited written prose.

It is composed of utterances that are often fragmented and overlapping.

They are not the complete, non-overlapping sentences which we carefully organize into larger units like the paragraphs, sections, and chapters of a book such as this one. It is the rare person indeed who ‘speaks in paragraphs.’

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Conversation What speakers and listeners have is a set of such principles; what they do in a particular conversation is draw on that set. It is also sometimes said that conversations are locally managed.

One particularly important principle used in conversation is the adjacency pair. Utterance types of certain kinds are found to co-occur: a greeting leads to a return of greeting; a summons leads to a response; a question leads to an answer; and so on.

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ConversationBoxer (2002, p. 51) provides a very short conversation that illustrates many of the points just made. Two female students pass each other on campus on the way to class:

A: Hey, how are you doing?B: Fine, how about you? Going to class?A: Calculus, I hate it! (keeps moving)B: Ugh! Well, catch you later.A: Yeah, see you at the meeting.

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ConversationOne consequence is that verbal exchanges which involve people from different cultural backgrounds can more easily go wrong than those that involve people who share the same cultural background (Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz, 1982, p. 14) :

“Many of the meanings and understandings, at the level of ongoing processes of interpretation of speaker’s intent, depend upon culturally specific conventions, so that much of the meaning in any encounter is indirect and implicit. The ability to expose enough of the implicit meaning to make for a satisfactory encounter between strangers or culturally different speakers requires communicative flexibility.”

Not everyone has such communicative flexibility, this ability to cross cultural boundaries.