Pragmatic Acts

Introduction

Traditionally, philosophers of language such as Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege and Rudolph Carnap, have focused on the truth value of sentences, that is whether a sentence is a true or false representation of real-world facts or conditions. They have been particularly interested in linguistic manipulations of the truth value of sentences. Compare:

If (a) is true, then (b) is false; if (b) is true, then (a) is false. In his later works, Wittgenstein, however, took an entirely different tack, arguing that language was a social activity and that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (1953: §43, 20, cited in Bach 2004: 463). Use in language is very much what pragmatics is about. But if we are studying usage, then in fact we are not simply studying sentences, or words, or any other traditional linguistic unit. Many pragmatics scholars deploy the notion of the utterance. Utterances are not abstract like sentences. Sentences can, for example, be realized as many different utterances (think, for example, of the different prosodies with which the sentence I’m sorry could be uttered). Some utterances do have an aspect that can be analyzed in terms of their truth value, but some do not. As exemplified by (a) and (b) above, utterances that have the form of declarative sentences are the main focus of many academic studies, because they express propositions or states of affairs which are truth conditional, that is, the state of affairs represented through the proposition can be evaluated against real-world conditions. This is not the case (or at least not straightforwardly the case) with interrogative or imperative sentences. Moreover, utterances do not even require traditional words in order to be pragmatically meaningful. Asking whether, say, the expressions ah or oh are true or not is simply an irrelevant question. Instead, the utterances are geared towards doing things – towards expressing surprise, confirming, acknowledging and so on. One drawback with the notion of utterance, which we should briefly mention, is that it suggests meanings are simply generated by speech. Of course, writing does this too. More particularly, the term utterance does not capture non-verbal meanings. For example, nodding one’s head is a way of expressing the affirmative in a number of English-speaking cultures. More accurately then, we are dealing with pragmatic behaviors generally, though we shall focus on utterances in particular.

We will elaborate on actions constituting interaction. We start from traditional speech act theory, then discuss the ways in which it has been applied, along with some of its deficiencies, and then in the final topics we suggest some modified or alternative approaches.