Illocutionary Act Essay

Third, “[…] people do not only produce utterances containing grammatical structures and words, they perform actions via those utterances.” (Yule, 1996, p. 47) . This phenomenon is called Speech Acts. They consist of sentences that escaped the frame of the traditional study; that is, they do not describe, neither do they report or tell how constative things are. Actually, such sentences (e.g. ‘I declare war’ and ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife’) go beyond the norms and, hence, go from describing or stating facts to doing. According to J. L. Austin, a philosopher of language, with whom Speech Act originated, these kinds of sentences are performative. The term ‘performative’ is taken form the verb ‘to perform’ which is at all times related

As mentioned before, Yule states that “the illocutionary act is performed via the communicative force of the utterance.” (Yule, 1996, p. 48) . And while telling a statement, within the borders of illocutionary act, the speaker might use explicit or implicit indicators or expressions that can provide the listener with signs to get the implied meaning of the message being uttered. This can be called, as Yule names it, ‘the illocutionary Force Indicating Device’ (IFID). On the one hand, explicit indicators can be highly noticed at the level of performative verbs. For instance, the utterances ‘I name my dog Bobby’ and ‘I sentence you to death’ contain performative verbs (to name and to sentence) which indicate the illocutionary act from which the listener can grasp the implied meaning. On the other hand, there are implicit indicators that can be deduced from some paralinguistic features (intonation, stress, voice pitch, facial expression, etc.) or, in other words, all aspects that do not include language while communicating. For example, in the imperative ‘GO now!’, the word in bold implicitly indicates the illocutionary force of speech act being performed by using stress and presumably high voice