1、语言学HowtodothingswithwordsHow to do things with words (1)How to Do Things with Words (1)b. Are you serving?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
2、. Austins secondobservation was that even in sentences with the grammatical form of declaratives, not all are usedto make statements. Austin identified a subset of declaratives that are not use to make true or falsestatements, such as in the examples below:a. I promise to take a taxi home.b. I bet y
3、ou five pounds that he gets breathalysed.c. I declare this meeting open.d. I warn you that legal 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
4、 a promise rather than just describing one. This kind of utterance he called performative utterances: 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 c
5、an contrast performative and non-performative verbs by these two features. A speaker would not 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
6、 the use of hereby with these sentences.a. I cook this cake.b. ?I hereby cook this cake.d. I start this car. b. ?I hereby start this car.Evaluating performative utterancesAustin argued that it is not useful to ask whether performative utterances like those above are true or not, rather we should ask
7、 whether they work or not: do they constitute a successful warning, bet, ship-naming etc.? In Austins terminology a performative that works is called felicitous and onethat does not is infelicitous. For them to work, such performatives have to satisfy the social conventions for a very obvious exampl
8、e, I cannot rename a ship by walking up to it in dock and saying I name this ship the Flying 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 conditio
9、ns. Examining these social conventions that support performatives, it is clear that there 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 forma
10、l acts like warning, thanking, etc. To describe the role of felicity conditions, Austin (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, theprocedure to include the uttering of certain w
11、ords by certain persons in certain circumstances. The particular persons and circumstances must be appropriate for the invocation of theparticular procedure invoked .The procedure must be executed by all the participants correctly. and completely.Austin went on to add sincerity clauses: firstly that
12、 participants must have the requisite thoughts,feelings and intentions, as specified by the procedure, and secondly, that if subsequent conduct iscalled for, the participants must so conduct themselves. If the speech act is unsuccessful by failingthe (1) or (2) conditions above, then he described it
13、 as a misfire. Thus my casually renaming anyship visiting Dublin docks is a misfire because (2) above is not adhered to. If the act is insincerelyperformed, then he described it as an abuse of a speech act, as for example saying I bet . with nointention to pay, or I promise . when I already intend t
14、o break the promise. Linguists, as opposedto philosophers, have tended not to be so interested in this second type of infelicity, since theprimary speech act has, in these cases, been successfully communicated.Explicit and implicit performativesLooking at examples of performative utterances earlier,
15、 we can say that they are characterized by special features:a. They tend 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
16、.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
17、 extend their analysis from these explicit performatives to other utterances. The first step was to point out that in some cases the same speech act seems to be performed but with a relaxation of some of the special characteristics mentioned above. We regularly meet utterances like those below, wher
18、e this is so:a. You are (hereby) charged with treason.b. Passengers are requested to avoid jumping out of the aircraft.c. Five pounds says he doesnt make the semi-final. /LIHow to Do Things with Words (3)Come up and see me sometime.We can easily provide the sentences above with corresponding explici
19、t performatives, as below:1. I (hereby) charge you with treason.2. We request that passengers avoid jumping out of the aircraft.3. I bet you five pounds that he doesnt make the semi-final.4. I invite you to come up and see me sometime.欢迎下载 2It seems reasonable to say that the sentences (a-d) could b
20、e uttered to perform the same speech acts as those in (1-4). In fact it seems that none of the special characteristics of performative utterances is indispensable to their performance. How then do we recognize these other performatives, which we can call implicit performatives? Answers to this have
21、varied somewhat in the development of the theory but Austins original contention was that it was an utterances ability to be expanded to an explicit performative that identified it as a performative utterance. Austin discussed at length the various linguistic means by which more implicit performativ
22、es could be marked, including the mood of the verb, auxiliary verbs, intonation, etc. We shall not follow the detail of his discussion here; see Austin (1975: 53-93). Of course we soon end up with a situation where the majority of performatives are implicit, needing expansion to make explicit their
23、force.One positive advantage of this translation strategy is that it focuses attention on the task of classifying the performative verbs of a language. For now, the basic claim is clear: explicit performatives are seen as merely a specialized subset of performatives whose nature as speech acts is mo
24、re unambiguous than most.Statements as performativesAustins original position was that performatives, which are speech acts subject to felicity conditions, are to be contrasted with declarative sentences, which are potentially true or false descriptions of situations. The latter were termed constati
25、ves. However, as his analysis developed, he collapsed the distinction and viewed the making of statements as just another type of speech act, which he called simply stating. Again, we neednt follow his line of argument closely here: see Austin (1975: 133-47) and the discussion in Schiffrin (1994: 50
26、-4). In simple terms, Austin argued that there is no theoretically sound way to distinguish between performatives and constatives. For example, the notion of felicity applies to statements too: statements which are odd because of presupposition failure, like the sentence The king of France is bald d
27、iscussed earlier, are infelicitous because the speaker has violated the conventions for referring to individuals (i.e. that the listener can identify them). This infelicity suspends our judgment of the truth or falsity of the sentence: it is difficult to say that The king of France is bald is false
28、in the same way as The president of France is a woman, even though they are both not true at the time of writing this. So we arrive at a view that all utterances constitute speech acts of one kind or another. For some the type of act is explicitly marked by their containing a verb labeling the act,
29、warn, bet, name, suggest, protest etc.; others are more implicitly signaled. Some speech acts are so universal and fundamental that their grammaticalization is the profound one of the distinction into sentence types we mentioned earlier. In their cross-linguistic survey of speech acts Sadock and Zwi
30、cky (1985: 160) observe:It is in some respects a surprising fact that most languages are similar in presenting three basic sentence types with similar functions and often strikingly similar forms. These are the declarative, interrogative, and imperative. As a first approximation, these three types c
31、an be described as follows: The declarative is used for making announcements, stating conclusions, making claims, relating stories, and so on. The interrogative elicits a verbal response from the addressee. It is used principally to gain information. The imperative indicates the speakers desire to i
32、nfluence future events. It is of service in making requests, giving orders, making suggestions, and the like.欢迎下载 3Though the authors go on to discuss the many detailed differences between the uses of these main forms in individual languages, it seems that sentence type is a basic marker of primary performative types.This conclusion that all utterances have a speech act force has led to a widespread view that there are two basic parts to meaning: the conventional meaning o
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