The Power of the Interlocutor: A Split-Agency Account of the Illocutionary Act

Elena Eid

Humboldt University of Berlin (and “Human Abilities” Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities)

Speech act theory debates the role of uptake. First, scholars disagree on whether uptake is necessary for illocutionary performance. Second, those who view it as a requirement contest its precise function. While McDonald (2020) holds that interlocutors only block illocutions by denying uptake, Kukla (2014) argues they actively constitute illocutions, even against the speaker’s intention. This renders interlocutors authors, not merely gatekeepers.

In this presentation, I argue for a constitutive approach and claim that the illocution of speakers is partly located in the interlocutor’s act of uptake. I defend the constitutive view of uptake, drawing from Kukla’s conception of discursive injustice while addressing McDonald’s objections. However, I depart from Kukla’s claim that Langton and Hornsby (1998) rely on a false distinction between illocution and perlocution. According to Kukla’s criticism, their argument that illocutions require uptake suggests they cannot be enacted at the moment of speaking. Illocutions would require a temporally distinct moment in which an interlocutor interprets the utterance and its force. This contradicts the definition of an illocution as acting in speaking. Moreover, Kukla criticises that uptake describes an effect and thereby would be part of the perlocution according to the traditional framework. Hence, the illocution/perlocution distinction collapses: the perlocution cannot be a necessary condition for the illocution if the illocution is itself a necessary condition of the perlocution.

I argue that this problem arises only if illocutions are understood as wholly enacted by the speaker at the moment of utterance. Against this assumption, I contend that illocutions are split into the acts of two agents: the speaker and the interlocutor. In uptake, pragmatic meaning is assigned that manifests the speaker’s illocutionary act at the very moment of assignment. Consequently, uptake is the process that completes the illocutionary act the speaker has started with their speech. This account preserves the illocution/perlocution distinction while grounding the constitutive role of uptake Kukla identifies in an alternative view on illocutions.

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