John R. Searle's Act Theory
The American philosopher and one of Austin 's student, John R. Searle, codifies and develops Austin 's act theory. he wanted to generalize the idea of speech acts to cover all the utterances of the English language (Searle, 1971: 40) According to him speaking a language is engaging in a rule-governed form of behaviour. He indicates that speaking a language is performing speech acts, acts such as making a statement, giving a command, asking a question etc. He believes that the unit of linguistic communication is not the word or sentence, but rather the production of words and sentences in the performance of speech acts. He considers speech acts as the minimal units of linguistic communication (Searle 1969: 16) Searle …show more content…
Searle mentioned that these acts must not be taken as spatiotemporally discrete and independent acts but mutually interdependent sub-acts of a complete act (Trosborg 1994: 18).
3.2.2.2 Searle Felicity Conditions of speech act The term felicity conditions (FCs) is defined as "the criteria that must be satisfied if the speech act is to achieve its purpose" (Crystal 1991:135). It represents the appropriate circumstances needed for the performance of a given speech act to be recognized as intended, (Yule 1996: 50).Searle sets up four kinds of conditions which govern the happy execution of an illocuationary act, if there is a violation of any of them, then the act is infelicitous(Al-Sulaimaan 1997: 28):
1. Propositional content conditions: These are regarded as text-dependent rules pertinent to the propositional act. They specify restrictions on the proposition of a sentence. For instance, in promise the content of utterance must be about a future event by the
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Each rule focuses upon a particular aspect of what is said: the propositional content rule focuses on the textual content, the preparatory on background circumstances, the sincerity on the speaker 's psychological state, and the essential rules on the illocutionary point or the purpose of what is uttered.
3.2.2.3 Searle 's (1979) Classification of Speech Acts Searle (1979: 10), criticizes Austin 's classification of speech acts, since it is based on overlapping criteria, some verbs can be found in more than one category. For example the verb "describe" is placed according to Austin 's taxonomy into both Verdictives and Expositives. Many linguists also criticizes Austin , since he supposes that there is a one-to-one correspondence between verbs and categories of speech acts in English , while in reality there are a lot of speech acts in language that are not expressed by the use of the performative verbs, such as "Hush", "Out" , etc. (Mey, 1993:11) , also (Yusuf ,1997: 22
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