Sentences, utterances, and speech acts

Most of the time, when we speak, we do more than express propositions; we suggest, promise, offer, accept, order, threaten, assert – we perform speech (or illocutionary) acts. The history of the research on this topic – initiated by Austin (1975) – is well-documented, and many textbooks, handbooks and encyclopaedias contain excellent surveys, thus treating speech acts as a major topic (e.g. Levinson 1983: chapter 5; Jaszczolt 2002: chapter 14; Sadock 2004). However, the main contemporary pragmatic theories of utterance interpretation devote little space, if any at all, to the way utterances are interpreted as speech acts, that is to the way they are assigned an illocutionary force (see, for instance, Sperber and Wilson 1986; Levinson 2000; Carston 2002; Recanati 2004a; Jaszczolt 2005). One might think that speech acts went out of fashion simply because the topic had been exhausted by the considerable number of publications spanning from Austin’s work in the late fifties to the late eighties – when other topics, such as the pragmatic determinants of literal meaning, came to the fore. Yet, contemporary literature is rife with confusions stemming from the lack of careful consideration of the role of illocutionary force attribution in utterance interpretation. In particular, two crucial mistakes must be avoided. The first consists in conceiving of illocutionary forces as determined by sentence meaning; the second equates utterance content and speech act content. Interestingly enough, both confusions can be traced back to the founding fathers of modern pragmatics: the former to Searle, the latter to Grice. I will start this chapter by considering these two problematic legacies in turn. Next, we will see how avoiding the confusion between sentence meanings, utterance meanings and illocutionary contents helps to better grasp the major issues related to the analysis of illocutionary force attribution.