The Psychological Foundations of the Grammar 61
(3) Commissives: which commit the hearer to undertake the course of
action represented in the propositional content of the utterance, e.g.
promises and guarantees.
(4) Expressives: which express the sincerity condition of the speech act,
e.g. congratulations and condolences.
(5) Declarations: which aim to bring about a change in the world simply by
representing the world as having changed, e.g. performatives.For example, a speaker who utters(8) I’ll come over at the weekend to help with the paintingattempts to perform a commissive speech act. Searle (1969: 63) proposes a
number of mandatory conditions which must be met before the speech act
can be counted as successful.
The rules of a felicitous promise. A is act. S is speaker. H is hearer.
Proposition^13 Future act A of S.
Preparatory Condition H prefers S’s doing A to S’s not doing
A, and S believes H prefers S’s doing A
to S’s not doing A. It is not obvious to
H that S will do A in the normal course
of events.
Sincerity Condition S intends to do A.
Essential Condition The utterance counts as an undertaking
of an obligation on S to do A.
Austin and Searle view communication as speakers engaging in rule
governed behaviour in pursuit of their own purposes. A slightly different
view is proposed by Leech (1983) who, like Austin and Searle, argues that
language is a means through which speakers achieve their ends. Leech
argues, however, that the illocutionary force of an utterance is not governed
by conventional rules but rather by implicatures generated by the message
which best satisfy the speaker’s communicative needs (ibid. 36–40).
Leach’s analysis has the advantage of being able to incorporate indirect
speech acts such as It’s cold in here in the same category (directives) as direct
speech acts, e.g. Switch on the heater. Searle’s rule governed analysis requires
that the utterance It’s cold in here instantiate two separate speech acts: with
the indirect speech act functioning as a means of performing the direct
speech act (Leech ibid. 39). Leech, however, regards all speech acts as an