Yan Xu
Durham University
“The success of speech acts depends on whether the listener can accurately identify what the speaker is doing in saying something—namely, their illocutionary acts, as defined in Austin’s speech act theory. To better ensure that listeners can accurately comprehend, scholars have framed the necessary preconditions either from the perspective of semantics—focusing on sentence structure, predicate use or morphology in the construction of meaning—or from the perspective of pragmatics, analysing the use of language, context, or the influence of social conventions on interpreting the speaker’s meaning. These efforts aim to establish normative frameworks—such as the Felicity Condition (Austin, 1962), Constitutional Rules (Searle, 1972, 2008), and Conversation Maxims (Grice, 1975)—to maximise the success of speech acts. However, such approaches seem to overlook the speaker’s proactive role as the initiator of speech acts Therefore, this article intends to explore how speakers can proactively secure the expected response from the listener when practicing speech acts. However, since speech acts are the phenomenon of language use, it is different from other physical entities which can be experienced by physical movements such as touching, observing and so on. In order to have a better understanding this phenomenon, this article adopts the phenomenological analysis approach, which focuses on how speakers experience speech acts and establishes an experience of the other participant in the speech act. I argue that the speaker’s pre-reflective consciousness allows the speaker to naturally pick up the strategy of acting with words in speech acts they experienced; and the alienation and projection of the consciousness of the self allows speakers to use their own reactions to specific language stimuli as a model to simulate the listener’s responses so as to actively recreate similar stimuli for listeners in their own speech acts to elicit the expected response.
References:
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford University Press.
Grice, H.P. (1975) ‘Logic and conversation’, in Cole, P. and Morgan, J.L. (eds.) Syntax and Semantics: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press, pp. 41–58.
Searle, J. R. (1972). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J.R. (2008) ‘Language and social ontology’, Philosophical Topics, 36(2), pp. 443–459.”
Chair: David Holtgrave
Time: 03 September, 16:50 – 17:20
Location: SR 1.006
SOPhiA 2026 