Interpersonal context: illocutionary force and speech acts
The relations between language and context are not limited to those in which a linguistic expression simply names or describes an already existing referent or state of affairs. The assertion of facts about the world is just one of the acts which we can use language to perform: we also ask questions, issue orders, and make requests, to mention only the three most obvious types of other act for which language is used. For much of the history of reflection on language (principally in philosophy), it was the asserting function that was seen as the most basic and important. Language was seen essentially as a means of describing (asserting facts about) reality, and its importance as an instrument which could perform a whole variety of different functions was not fully appreciated.
As it happens, there is good reason to see description or fact-assertion as a particularly basic function of language. As noted by Givón (1984: 248), the fundamental role of assertion in language can be seen as a consequence of four large-scale features of human social organization and the types of talk-exchange it engenders:
• communicative topics are often outside the immediate, perceptually available range;
• much pertinent information is not held in common by the participants in the communicative exchange;
• the rapidity of change in the human environment necessitates periodic updating of the body of shared background knowledge;
• the participants are often strangers.
Givón continues (1984: 248):
Under such conditions, even granted that the ultimate purpose of the communicative transaction is indeed to manipulate the other toward some target action, the interlocutors must first – and in fact constantly – create, recreate and repair the body of shared knowledge which is the absolute prerequisite for the ultimate communicative transaction.
Nevertheless, assertion is not the only kind of function which language may be used to perform. We do not just use language to talk about or describe the world; we do things with language in order to manipulate and induce transformations in it. One way to think about how we use language to provoke transformations in the external world is in terms of the idea of force. As we saw in 3.2.1, Frege had already distinguished the force of a linguistic expression from its sense. The conception of force in Frege is still rather sketchy: the only types of force he considers seem to be statements and questions. In a famous series of lectures delivered in the early 1950s, the British philosopher John L. Austin, one of Frege’s translators, extended the Fregean notion of force. Austin’s pupil, John R. Searle, developed these ideas into a comprehensive philosophy of language, the theory of speech acts. We will explore this tradition in the present section.
