语言学Howtodothingswithwords文档格式.docx

1、c. Hello. d. Six pints of stout and a packet of peanuts, please!e. Give me the dry roasted ones. f. How much? Are you serious?Such sentences are not descriptions and cannot be said to be true or false. Austins second observation was that even in sentences with the grammatical form of declaratives, n

2、ot all are used to make statements. Austin identified a subset of declaratives that are not use to make true or false statements, such as in the examples below:a. I promise to take a taxi home. b. I bet you five pounds that he gets breathalysed. c. I declare this meeting open. d. I warn you that leg

3、al action will ensue. e. I name this ship The Flying Dutchman. Austin claimed of these sentences that they were in themselves a kind of action: thus by uttering: I promise to take a taxi home. a speaker makes a promise rather than just describing one. This kind of utterance he called performative ut

4、terances: in these examples they perform the action named by the first verb in the sentence, and we can insert the adverb hereby to stress this function, e.g. I hereby request that you leave my property. We can contrast performative and non-performative verbs by these two features. A speaker would n

5、ot for example expect the uttering of （a） below to constitute the action of cooking a cake, or （d） the action of starting a car. These sentences describe actions independent of the linguistic act. Accordingly the use of hereby with these sentences.a. I cook this cake. b. ?I hereby cook this cake.d.

6、I start this car. b. ?I hereby start this car. Evaluating performative utterances Austin argued that it is not useful to ask whether performative utterances like those above are true or not, rather we should ask whether they work or not: do they constitute a successful warning, bet, ship-naming etc.

7、? In Austins terminology a performative that works is called felicitous and one that does not is infelicitous. For them to work, such performatives have to satisfy the social conventions for a very obvious example, I cannot rename a ship by walking up to it in dock and saying I name this ship the Fl

8、ying Dutchman. Less explicitly, there are social conventions governing the giving of orders to co-workers, greeting strangers, etc. Austins name for the enabling conditions for a performative is felicity conditions. Examining these social conventions that support performatives, it is clear that ther

9、e is a gradient between performatives that are highly institutionalized, or even ceremonial, requiring sophisticated and very overt support, like the example of a judge pronouncing sentence, through to less formal acts like warning, thanking, etc. To describe the role of felicity conditions, Austin

10、（1975: 25-38） wrote a very general schema:How to Do Things with Words （2） There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, the procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances. The particular persons and circumsta

11、nces must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked . The procedure must be executed by all the participants correctly. . and completely. Austin went on to add sincerity clauses: firstly that participants must have the requisite thoughts, feelings and intentions, as speci

12、fied by the procedure, and secondly, that if subsequent conduct is called for, the participants must so conduct themselves. If the speech act is unsuccessful by failing the （1） or （2） conditions above, then he described it as a misfire. Thus my casually renaming any ship visiting Dublin docks is a m

13、isfire because （2） above is not adhered to. If the act is insincerely performed, then he described it as an abuse of a speech act, as for example saying I bet . with no intention to pay, or I promise . when I already intend to break the promise. Linguists, as opposed to philosophers, have tended not

14、 to be so interested in this second type of infelicity, since the primary speech act has, in these cases, been successfully communicated. Explicit and implicit performatives Looking at examples of performative utterances earlier, we can say that they are characterized by special features:a. They ten

15、d to begin with a first person verb in a form we could describe as simple present: I bet, I warn, etc. b. This verb belongs to a special class describing verbal activities for example: promise, warn, sentence, name, bet, pronounce. c. Generally their performative nature can be emphasized by inserting the adverb hereby, as described earlier, thus I hereby sentence you to. Utterances with these characteristics we can call explicit performatives. The importance of speech act theory lies in the way that Austin and others managed to extend their analysis from these explicit performatives to o