Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

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2. Semantic Structure and Illocutionary Force

   • Manfred Bierwisch

   Pages 1-35

3. Perlocutions

   • Steven Davis

   Pages 37-55

4. Pragmatic Entailment and Questions

   • Gilles Fauconnier

   Pages 57-69

5. Surface Compositionality and the Semantics of Mood

   • Roland R. Hausser

   Pages 71-95

6. Yes-No Questions as Wh-Questions

   • Ferenc Kiefer

   Pages 97-119

7. Syntactic Meanings

   • Hans-Heinrich Lieb

   Pages 121-153

8. Situational Context and Illocutionary Force

   • Wolfgang Motsch

   Pages 155-168

9. Semantics and Pragmatics of Sentence Connectives in Natural Language

   • Roland Posner

   Pages 169-203

10. Some Remarks on Explicit Performatives, Indirect Speech Acts, Locutionary Meaning and Truth-Value

    • François Récanati

    Pages 205-220

11. The Background of Meaning

    • John R. Searle

    Pages 221-232

12. Towards a Pragmatically Based Theory of Meaning

    • Petr Sgall

    Pages 233-246

13. Illocutionary Logic and Self-Defeating Speech Acts

    • Daniel Vanderveken

    Pages 247-272

14. Telling the Facts

    • Zeno Vendler

    Pages 273-290

15. Methodological Remarks on Speech Act Theory

    • Dieter Wunderlich

    Pages 291-312

16. Back Matter

    Pages 313-319

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In the study of language, as in any other systematic study, there is no neutral terminology. Every technical term is an expression of the assumptions and theoretical presuppositions of its users; and in this introduction, we want to clarify some of the issues that have surrounded the assumptions behind the use of the two terms "speech acts" and "pragmatics". The notion of a speech act is fairly well understood. The theory of speech acts starts with the assumption that the minimal unit of human communica­ tion is not a sentence or other expression, but rather the performance of certain kinds of acts, such as making statements, asking questions, giving orders, describing, explaining, apologizing, thanking, congratulating, etc. Characteristically, a speaker performs one or more of these acts by uttering a sentence or sentences; but the act itself is not to be confused with a sentence or other expression uttered in its performance. Such types of acts as those exemplified above are called,following Austin, illocutionary acts, and they are standardly contrasted in the literature with certain other types of acts such as perlocutionary acts and propositional acts. Perlocutionary acts have to do with those effects which our utterances have on hearers which go beyond the hearer's understanding of the utterance. Such acts as convincing, persuading, annoying, amusing, and frightening are all cases of perlocutionary acts.

• Index
• direct speech
• indirect speech
• semantics
• subject
• syntactic

• University of California, Berkeley, USA

  John R. Searle

• Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

  Ferenc Kiefer

• La Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, France

  Ferenc Kiefer

• Academy of Sciences of the G.D.R., Berlin, Germany

  Manfred Bierwisch

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