Our discussion up until now has followed the work of Austin. However a problem with Austin's work is that it focused on performative verbs. This is a problem because there are speech acts with no (overt) performative verb. A threat is one type of speech act, but we don't use threaten as a performative, as shown in (23).
(23) #I hereby threaten you.
Austin tries to get around this problem by distinguishing explicit versus implicit performatives. However, that strategy introduces an ambiguity. There are multiple paraphrases for utterances (e.g., is "Come to my office" a threat or an invitation). And more importantly, assertion is a speech act as well. This is a problem for the performative/constative distinction.
KEY POINT: The mapping between sentences and speech acts is not so straightforward. We need to look at the speech acts themselves (independently of the sentences used to perform them)
Our premise going forward is that for a speaker to utter a sentence is for them to perform an action. We will distinguish different levels of this action, some of which may coincide and some of which may diverge depending on the speech act and the context. First, there is the locutionary act which is the utterance of a sentence with determinate sense and reference (literal meaning). The utterance of (24) is associated with a literal meaning once we work out which final exam is the relevant exam and what day tomorrow is. Next we have the illocutionary act which is one of the set of acts discussed so far (informing, guessing, reminding, warning, threatening, requesting, etc.) and is achieved via the conventional force associated with the utterance or its explicit performative paraphrase. In the case of (24), the illocutionary act might be a reminder, for example.
(24) The final exam is tomorrow.
Lastly, we can talk about the perlocutionary act which specifies what speakers bring about or achieve by saying something (e.g., convincing, persuading, deterring). In the case of (24), the utterance may bring about the result of the hearer taking time to study. Note that the conventional illocutionary force of an utterance can be made explicit (e.g., by adding "that's a threat" or "I guess" or "let me remind you").
COMIC INTERLUDE: to listen to some speech acts, click here (transcript here) and to watch some double-talk comedy (and read a bit about speech acts), click here
The rest of this section outlines the felicity conditions that must be considered for speech acts to be used, well, felicitously. At bare minimum, there's the necessity for normal input and output conditions to obtain. This includes aspects of the situation that ensure that communication is possible at all. This is a general prerequisite for all communication regardless of illocutionary force.
The condition imposed at the level of propositional content establishes the semantic meaning of the sentence that has been uttered. It is given by our semantic theory and is the same across different speech acts. For example, if we consider the speech act of promising, the meaning of a promise is to attribute a future action to the speaker.
Next we have preparatory conditions which are concerned with the speaker and hearer's attitudes towards the truth of the propositional content. These include expectations and preferences, etc. and also encompass the lexical meaning of performative verbs. To continue the example with promise, the preparatory conditions cover (i) that the hearer prefers the speaker's performing the future action over him/her not doing so and (ii) that it is not clear that the speaker would perform the future action anyway.
The sincerity conditions have to do with the speaker and hearer's plans and intentions. For promises, the speaker must intend to perform the future action. Nothing is required of the hearer's plans and intentions in the case of a promise.
Lastly, the essential conditions summarise the result of the successful speech act. For promises, the speaker undertakes an obligation to perform the future action.
KEY POINT: The four dimensions used to classify speech acts are propositional content, preparatory conditions, sincerity conditions, and essential conditions.
Under Searle's (1976) taxonomy, there are 5 types of speech acts:
But the taxonomy above belies the fact that there are as many things one can do with language as there are things one can do.
To go on to section 6.4 "Indirect speech acts", click here.