Speech Act - History

History

For much of the history of linguistics and the positivist philosophy of language, language was viewed primarily as a way of making factual assertions, and the other uses of language tended to be ignored. The work of J. L. Austin, particularly his How to Do Things with Words, led philosophers to pay more attention to the non-declarative uses of language. The terminology he introduced, especially the notions "locutionary act", "illocutionary act", and "perlocutionary act", occupied an important role in what was then to become the "study of speech acts". All of these three acts, but especially the "illocutionary act", are nowadays commonly classified as "speech acts".

Austin was by no means the first one to deal with what one could call "speech acts" in a wider sense. Earlier treatments may be found in history of religion and belief in magic power of spells, also later in monotheistic religions, such as in the works of some church fathers, following much cited New Testament ideas like ζάω γάρ ὁ λόγος ὁ θεός καί ἐνεργής (Hebrews 4:12) in turn based on much cited Old Testament ideas like כן יהיה דברי אשר יצא מפי לא־ישוב אלי ריקם כי אם־עשה את־אשר חפצתי והצליח אשר שלחתיו׃ (Isaiah 55:11).

Indeed, the very first chapter of the Bible (Genesis 1) has God creating the world by a series of speech acts: "Let there be light!"

This idea the Fathers saw echoed in the first words of the Gospel of John, applied by him to Jesus: "In the beginning was the Word." and scholastic philosophers, in the context of sacramental theology, Austin's own example of a wedding ceremony (also in Language, Truth and Logic) is an example of sacramental theology in the Roman Catholic tradition.

Protestants rejected marriage as a sacrament, and viewed ministers as witnesses not executors of the wedding of the couple, binding themselves to one another via the speech acts of their vows.

The term 'social act' and some of the theory of this sui generis type of linguistic action are to be found in the fifth of Thomas Reid's Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (1788, chapter VI, Of the Nature of a Contract). "A man may see, and hear, and remember, and judge, and reason; he may deliberate and form purposes, and execute them, without the intervention of any other intelligent being. They are solitary acts. But when he asks a question for information, when he testifies a fact, when he gives a command to his servant, when he makes a promise, or enters into a contract, these are social acts of mind, and can have no existence without the intervention of some other intelligent being, who acts a part in them. Between the operations of the mind, which, for want of a more proper name, I have called solitary, and those I have called social, there is this very remarkable distinction, that, in the solitary, the expression of them by words, or any other sensible sign, is accidental. They may exist, and be complete, without being expressed, without being known to any other person. But, in the social operations, the expression is essential. They cannot exist without being expressed by words or signs, and known to the other party."

Adolf Reinach (1883–1917) and Stanislav Škrabec (1844-1918), have been both independently credited with a fairly comprehensive account of social acts as performative utterances dating to 1913, long before Austin and Searle.

The term "Speech Act" had also been already used by Karl Bühler.

The term metalocutionary act has also been used to indicate a speech act that refers to the forms and functions of the discourse itself rather than continuing the substantive development of the discourse, or to the configurational functions of prosody and punctuation.