语言学How-to-do-things-with-words说课材料.doc

语言学How to do things with words精品文档How 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. Austins second observation was that even in sentences with the grammatical form of declaratives, not 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 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 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 can 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 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 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.? 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 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 conditions. 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 formal 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, the procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances. The particular persons and circumstances 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 specified 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 misfire 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 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 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. 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 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, where 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 explicit 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. It seems reasonable to say that the sentences (a-d) could be 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 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 performatives 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 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 more unambiguous than most. Statements as performatives Austins 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 constatives. 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: 50-4). 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 discussed 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 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, 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 Zwicky (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 can 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 influence future events. It is of service in making requests, giving orders, making suggestions, and the like. Though 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 of the sentence (often described as a proposition) and the speakers intended speech act. Thus we can view our earlier examples, repeated below, as divisible into propositional meaning (represented in small capitals below) and a sentence type marker, uniting to form a speech act as shown in:How to Do Things with Words (4)Siobhin is painting the anaglypta. SIOBHAN PAINT THE ANAGL=A + declarative -= statementIs Siobhin painting the anaglypta? SIOBHAN PAINT THE ANAGLYPTA + interrogative = questionSIOBNAN PAINT THE ANAGLYPTA + imperative = orderIf only Siobhin would paint the anaglyptaSIOBHAN PAINT THE ANAGLYPTA + optative = wish Three facets of a speech act Austin proposed that communicating a speech act consists of three elements: the speaker says something, the speaker signals an associated speech act, and the speech act causes an effect on her listeners or the participants. The first element he called the locutionary act, by which he meant the act of saying something that makes sense in a language, i.e. follows the rules of pronunciation and grammar. The second, the action intended by the speaker, he termed the illocutionary act. This is what Austin and his successors have mainly been concerned with: the uses to which language can be put in society. In fact the term speech acts is often used with just this meaning of illocutionary acts. The third element, called the perlocutionary act, is concerned with what follows an utterance: the effect or take-up of an illocutionary act. Austin gave the example of sentences like Shoot her! In appropriate circumstances this can have the illocutionary force of ordering, urging or advising the addressee to shoot her, but the perlocutionary force of persuading, forcing, frightening, etc. the addressee into shooting her. Perlocutionary effects are less conventionally tied to linguistic forms and so have been of less interest to linguists. We know for example that people can recognize orders without obeying them. Categorizing Speech Acts After Austins original explorations of speech act theory there have been a number of works which attempt to systematize the approach. One importnt focus has been to categorize the types of speech act possible in languages. J. R. Searle for example, while allowing that there is a myriad of language particular speech acts, proposed that all acts fall into five main types:1. REPRESFNTATIVES, which commit the speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition (paradigm cases: asserting, concluding); 2. DIRECTRVES, which are attempts by the speaker to get the addressee to do something (paradigm cases: requesting, questioning); 3. COMMISSIVES, which commit the speaker to some future course of action (paradigm cases: promising, threatening, offering); 4. EXPRESSIVES, which express a psychological state (paradigm cases: thanking, apologizing, welcoming, congratulating); 5. DECLARATIONS, which effect immediate changes in the institutional state of affairs and which tend to rely on elaborate extra linguistic institutions (paradigm cases: excommunicating, declaring war, christening, marrying, firing from employment).How to Do Things with Words(5)First, it should be noted that words are not objects or things that have properties of their own in the same way that actually existing things do. Words are relational entities. Which is to say that words are composed of parts that are not integrated by any form or structure intrinsic to the word itself. The symbols (marks/sounds) which taken together constitute a word, make the word real insofar as it exists outside the mind; but, as vibrations in the air or as marks on paper, words exist as relational entities and not as actual things.This is due to the fact that the medium which carries the word is not proportionate to the idea or concept which constitutes the form of the word. All that the air or paper and ink can carry is the symbolic representation of the actual form which is understood within the mind, and not the form itself.When a word is spoken or written it becomes a relational entity which lacks the power to do or to cause anything. While it is true that the vibrations in the air or the marks on a piece of paper can stimulate the senses, a word as such, can not cause knowledge. As Augustine noted:We learn nothing by means of these signs we call words. On the contrary, as I said, we learn the force of the word, that is the meaning which lies in the sound of the word, when we come to know the object signified by the word. Then only do we perceive that the word was a sign conveying that meaning.The person who hears or sees the word must already know what it means if she is to be able to understand it. That is why, if someone does not understand the meaning of a word, you must explain it using ot