60 A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse
In the course of his investigation, Austin (1975) realized that all utterances
can be viewed as instances of action as well as descriptive reports. He argued
that the saying of an utterance performs a locutionary act:^10 an illocutionary
act; and in most instances a perlocutionary act (ibid. 98–102), e.g.
(7) He said to me Shoot the dog! Locutionary act.
He urged/ordered/advised etc me to shoot the dog. Illocutionary
act (of urging, commanding, advising etc.).
He persuaded me to shoot the dog. Perlocutionary act.
The speaker performs the locutionary act by uttering shoot the dog. Searle
(1969: 47), following Grice (1957/89),^11 argues that speakers produce
illocutionary effects by means of getting their hearers to recognize their
intention to produce the illocutionary effects. In (7) a successful illocution-
ary act is produced if the hearer recognizes that he/she has been urged/
commanded/advised, etc to shoot the dog. The perlocutionary act is the
effect the utterance has on the hearers; in this case a successful perlocution-
ary act results in the hearer shooting or attempting to shoot the dog. Searle
does not propose a mechanism explaining how hearers are able to recog-
nize speakers’ intentions. This omission is not, however, problematic as the
concept of cognitive environments outlined in Section 2.2 is well capable of
explaining how people recognize the communicative intentions of others.
Austin (1975: 150) suggests that the number of different kinds of speech
acts runs into the thousands.^12 He has been criticized by Leech (1983: 175)
and Searle (1979: 2) for equating the number of speech acts with the num-
ber of verbs in English. Searle (1969: 30) states that the illocutionary force
of an utterance is indicated by a number of devices which:
include at least: word order, stress, intonation contour, punctuation, the
mood of the verb, and the so-called performative verbs.Yet, as Leech (1983: 177) points out, Searle’s classifi cation of speech acts
is based solely on the analysis of performative verbs. Searle (1998: 146–50)
proposes the following taxonomy of speech acts which he claims accom-
modates all instances of speech.
(1) Assertives: which are literally true or false.
(2) Directives: which aim to get the hearer to behave in such a way that
his/her behaviour matches the propositional content of the utterance,
e.g. commands and requests.