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Poetics I5 (1986) 243-57 North-Holland
PRAGMATICS
FOR CRITICISM
Two Generations of Speech Act Theory Joseph
A. PORTER*
The first part of this essay reports how speech act theory. now in its second generation, looks to a Shakespearean and user of the classic, first-generation theory. I concentrate on work of the past decade or so. the pure theory as yet largely unassimilated in criticism. But first a review of firstgeneration theory is in order since, while a nodding acquaintance with such key terms as ‘performative’ is increasingly apparent in criticism at large, the nod is often merely token. and there is widespread confusion and misinformation about the originating texts. often in the very best and liveliest criticism (cf. Altieri (198 I : 7 I fT.), Greenblatt (I 980: 87). and Miller (1977: 49)). The second part of the essay turns to criticism. first discussing the peculiarly fertile ground for pragmatics provided by current Shakespeare studies, and then attempting to situate general critical pragmatics Lvith respect to some more visible critical landmarks.
1. Introduction J.L. Austin’s exposition of his theory, Hon. to rio rhirlgs pith bcorcis. the posthumous, lightly edited, and sometimes fragmentary notes for a lecture series (including a vexed sequence of provision and revision through the series) have permitted and even prompted misunderstanding, notably with the term ‘performative’.’ Austin initially observes that performatives -utterances of the form ‘I hereby VP . ..‘-- prove the logical positivist account of language inadequate since they fall into neither of its two categories, utterances with truth-value and ‘emotive-expressive-nonsensical’ utterances like Ouch! or Olivier’s Hamlet * Author’s address: J.A. Porter, Duke University, Dept. of English. Durham, North Carolina 27706, USA. ’ Partridge (1982: 29) observes that the term ‘performative’ is ‘not at all uniformly employed. This is the case even-and particularly-with Austin’. While Austin’s notorious lack of uniformity gives rise to the lack of uniformity Partridge notices, in fact kvithin pure speech act theory of the second generation thete is widespread concurrence in the Austinian usage adopted here. i.e. the restriction of ‘performative’ to explicit illocutionary acts. Fraser (1982: 7) provides a lucid characterization of the performative which generalizes Austin, abandoning his syntactic constraints but maintaining his explicitness requirements. Decidedly in the minority are such second-generation theorists as Kates (1980) and Recanati (1981). who make ‘performative’ synonymous with ‘speech act’. As adopted by literary theorists and critics the term ‘performative’ has tended to grow fuzzier.
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is escellent. Setting aside the emotive-etc. group, Austin provisionally contrasts ‘constatives’ (utterances ivith truth-value such as Shakespeare died in 1616) with performatives (utterances without truth-value in which an act is performed. such as I hereh!, christen this theater the Globe). But this distinction breaks down as Austin remarks that asserting. denying. affirming. stating that. etc.. are themselves kinds of acts that may be performed with the performative formula (as ivith I hereb!. assert that Shakespenre died in 1616). Hence Austin moves to his definitive account of what distinguishes performatives: the speech act in question-christening. denial, etc.-is done explicitly. inasmuch as the verb in the independent clause names the act the speaker performs with the utterance (1967: 61). In performing such an act, which Austin terms an ‘illocution’ or ‘illocutionar]’ act’, one also performs the act of uttering the sentence(s), the ‘locutionary act’. Furthermore. in performing both these acts one may also be performing a third kind of act done through speech, a ‘perlocution’. Thus the illocutionary act of (explicitly) urging may involve the locutionary act saying I urge J’OUto red Harder’. and the perlocutionary act of persuading you. With this much of the theory in place-and this much has stayed in place as the basis for developments to date-Austin concludes with what has proved the least satisfactory part of his theory, a taxonomy of ‘illocutionary force’. a provisional di\-ision of speech acts into five families: verdictives, exercitives. cornmissives. behabitives. and expositives. Of cornmissives, for instance. he says. ‘The whole point of a cornmissive is to commit the speaker to a certain course of action’. and he gives thirty-three examples including promise, vow, m’ecIr, and bet (1962: 156157). While some have found Austin’s goal of a taxonomy untenable (cf. Searle (1969). Verschueren (1976). Leech (1980)). commentators generally have found Austin’s goal admirable. Most however have found his attempt to realize it unacceptably arbitrary (see section 1.3 ‘Tasonomy’). John R. Searle and H.P. Grice are the two other primary exponents of classic speech act theory. In Speech acts Searle addresses Austin’s taxonomic deficiency and proposes a uniform system for describing speech acts in terms of four kinds of conditions for the felicitous performance of any speech act (1969: 66). According to this analysis each speech act type is distinct from every other by at least one condition. and no single taxonomy is privileged since the range of speech acts may be divided into various family groupings depending on constants and variables among the four conditions. But later Searle does propose a taxonomy, one of a number of revisions of Austin proposed in the past decade (cf. Searle (1976), and section 2.3 below). H.P. Grice. in Logic and conversation (1975, but widely circulated and discussed since delivery as a lecture in 1968), accounts for ‘conversational implicature’-the intended derivation by the hearer of \vhat is tacitly communicated in an utterance. Grice posits that conversationalists use a ‘Cooperative
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Principle’: ‘Make your conversational contribution such as is required . ..’ (1975: 45). To articulate the principle, Grice posits maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. The category of Quantity, for instance, is represented by two maxims, ‘Make your contribution as informative as is required’, and ‘Do not make your contribution more informative than is required’ (1975: 4.5,46). The connection between the Cooperative Principle and maxims on the one hand and ‘conversational implicature’ on the other comes from the possibility of exploiting maxims by flouting them: a speaker may: ‘(...)/Io~f a maxim: that is. he may blnranriy fail to fulfill it... This situation is one which characteristically gives rise to a conversational implicature; and when a conversational implica(1975: -l9) ture is generated in this H-a!. I shall say that a maxim is being e.y/oired.’
While Grice does not adopt wholesale the Austin-Searle speech act terminology, and while his approaches differ so notably from theirs that it could be misleading to call him a speech act theorist, in fact his conversational implicature operates by illocutionary force and his conclusions so overlap with Austin’s and Searle’s that he is customarily linked with them. Austin, Searle, and Grice, together with such early commentators and theorizers as Habermas (1976) Hare (1970) and Vendler (1972) make up classic first-generation speech act theory. It is philosophical, analytic--‘descriptive’ in the sense meant by Strawson (1959: xii)-and frequently linguistic in character. None of its exponents is much concerned with any bearing the theory might have on literary theory and criticism. But the classic speech act analysis with its rich manifold of precise discriminations has since the early 1970’s proved attractive to such scholars writing about literature as Altieri (1981) Campbell (1975) Dubrow (forthcoming), Elam (1984), Fish (1976). Hancher (1975) Lanser (1981) Ohmann (1971. 1973, 1974) Porter (1979). and Pratt (1977), and Meyers and Hopkins (1977) and Verschueren (1978) provide some coverage of critical applications of the theory. Meanwhile pure speech act theory has continued to develop, a second generation unaffected by such use as literary critics have made of the first generation. Indeed pure speech act theorists of the second generation seem quite unaware of literary critics’ use of their predecessors. More to the point here, the lack of awareness is reciprocal: literary commentators and theorists, even those most indebted to speech act theory, ignore developments in speech act theory of the past decade. When on occasion a literary theorist acknowledges life in speech act theory since 1974, it is most characteristically to dismiss that life for its unruliness, as does Altieri when he avows that ‘this field is now in turmoil’ (1981: 69). That turmoil may be in the eye of the beholderAltieri swims against the tide in his use of the term ‘performative’, although he does in general demonstrate an appreciation and understanding of first generation pragmatic theory unusual in criticism.
That the field is indeed too lively to have justice done it in a few pages may be seen from the following survey of five topics widely discussed in second-generation speech act theory: pragmatics. the performative. taxonomy, Gricean conversation analysis, and global and manifold speech acts. The topics are hardly mutually exclusive, and indeed they bear on each other in more ways than can be treated here.
2. Current issues -7.1. Pragnzarics
Although the term pragmatics dates from well before, only in the past decade has it gained wide currency. Formed in obvious parallel with the traditional levels of linguistic analysis-phonetics. syntactics. and semantics-and meant by Morris (1938) and Carnap (1942) to be joined with the second and third levels to form a triadic division of semiotics. pragmatics before Austin was little more than a desideratum. Seung (1982: 76ff.) surveys the early history of the term. Seung’s view of pragmatics as including speech act theory is now standard, although Searle (1979: 179) holds that ‘the theory of speech acts (. . .) nil1 include all of what used to be called semantics as well as pragmatics’. The enabling effect of Austin’s explorations may be seen in the comparative assurance of recent definitions of pragmatics. Leech (1980: 2) holds it to be ‘the study of the relation between linguistic signs and their users’. or. more narrowly, ‘the study of the relation between the abstract meaning or sense of linguistic expressions, and the communicative force which they have for speakers and hearers in given utterance situations’. Leech’s definitions are based on Morris, although Morris conceives of pragmatics as the study of the relation between all (including nonlinguistic) signs and their users. While Seung (1978: 77) follows Morris, speech act theorists generally agree with Leech in restricting their observations to linguistic signs. Cole (1978: ix) distinguishes ‘between semantics and pragmatics, the former having to do with what linguistic expressions mean and the latter with what speakers mean (i.e., intend to convey) by using these expressions’. Grice (1957: 377-388) early separates speaker-meaning from utterance-meaning, and Schiffer (1972) uses Grice as a point of departure for an extended account of speaker-meaning, the domain of pragmatics, as opposed to utterance-meaning, the domain of semantics. The growing legitimacy of the term marks an increasing awareness of ‘a new era in the study of meaning and grammar, one in which the issues are more complex and the problems more trying than had been imagined previously’ (Cole (1978: xii)). With respect to speech act theory, the developing study of pragmatics has illuminated areas where the theory shades into a general philosophy of action. The focus has proved especially helpful in discussions of
the key roles of convention and intention in speech acts. such as Holdcroft’s treatment of ‘Illocutionary acts and intentions’ (1978: 13 l- 137) or the subdivision by Bach and Harnish of illocutions into two categories, each with its own kind of associated intention (1979: 12-13, 108-116). And discussions of numerous narrower subjects (including numbers two through five below) have profited from the currency of the term pragmatics. Two periodicals and a monograph series have been devoted to pragmatics. and Verschueren, in Pragmcltics: an nr~notated bibliography (1978). lists over 1500 publications primarily from the preceding decade, with annual supplements scheduled in the Journal of Pragmntics. Outside pure theory, adoption and application of the category of pragmatics is proceeding apace, often most readily outside literary studies. Akmajian, Demers. and Harnish’s Linguistics contains in the first edition (1979) a chapter on ‘the very new subfield of pragmatics (...) which is not even old enough to have developed opposing schools’, and in the second edition (1984) ‘a significantly revised chapter on pragmatics’. Even in cybernetics, ‘the final stage of analysis. in a language-understanding program, is pragmatic analysis (. . .)’ (Winograd (1984: 139)). As for literary applications, according to Van Dijk (1981: 263) ‘the pragmatic analysis of literature is just beginning’. Where the term has currency in literary studies and discussion (as in special sessions at MLA Conventions over the past decade), it has already provided a useful frame of reference for matters whose interrelatedness would earlier have remained obscure or required laborious demonstration. 2.2. The performntive The peculiar animal that led Austin into the realm of speech acts has continued to interest, and in some cases to bedevil, speech act theorists of the past decade. Although for the most part they have avoided the confusion about the meaning of the term now endemic in literary studies, the performative has given them two large problem-the abstract performative hypothesis and the ‘tyranny of the performative’ (Leech (1980: 79)) in discussions of kinds of illocutionary force. The abstract performative hypothesis advanced in the early 1970s attempted to assimilate pragmatics into formal transformational-generative linguistics. According to the fullest exposition, the hypothesis ‘provides that every sentence contain as its highest deep-syntactic (and semantic) clause a structure like those that give rise to explicit performatives’, i.e. a clause containing ‘an abstract performative verb which specifies the force of the sentence . . .’ (Sadock (1974: 17) cf. Lakoff (1968), McCawley (1968) Sadock (1970) Ross (1970)). Generally associated with the hypothesis is the thesis that ‘performatives constitute the central point of language behavior and that syntactic processes are dependent on them’ (Patridge (1982: 134)). But the hypothesis, having
begged or raised more questions than it could answer, has generally been rejected by speech act theorists. Gazdar (1974) surveys objections and according to Leech ‘no one seems to believe it any more’ (1980: 59). Leech sees the rejection of the hypothesis as symptomatic of the increasingly firm foundation of speech act theory outside the walled garden of formal linguistics. Like Leech and other recent commentators, Partridge rejects the abstract performative hypothesis. He also rejects the thesis (which he attributes to Austin) ‘that there is an explicit performative for every illocutionary act’ (1982: 134). Though Austin does not advance this thesis. it grows naturally out of his taxonomic method, and is an example of ‘the tyranny of the performative’the practice of ‘assuming that corresponding to every performative verb there is an illocution’ (Leech (1980: 85)), and ricr I’USCZ. This question, unlike that of the abstract performative. has not been resolved, even by agreement to dismiss it. While the general tendency is to reject the view ‘that a performative sentence is somehow the standard explicit form in terms of which non-performatives are assigned implicit performative force . ..’ (Leech 1980: 99)) Searle and others at times reject that view far less categorically than does Leech, so that the jury is still out. The question bears importantly on Searle’s ‘Principle of Expressibility, stating that whatever can be meant can be said’ (1969: 68). and on questions of global speech acts, the discreteness of kinds of illocutionary force, and the function of explicitness. Patridge holds that ‘performativeness is not an autonomous phenomenon, but a constellation of coocurrence relationships’ (1952: 135). Holdcroft (1978: 61-63. 1699170) commits himself to denying that illocutionary force can be made explicit. but his denial is less than full-blooded. Verschueren posits a ‘performativity continuum’ (1980: 17) rather than a sharp distinction between performative verbs and non-performative speech act verbs. Austin’s airy if plausible speculations about a late development of explicitness in the evolution of language (1962: 145) suggest attention to literary performativeness as a function of period. = oenre, and writer. It vvould seetn safe, for instance, to wager that performatives are more common in Shakespeare’s drama than in (1) narrative works, including his own, of whatever period, (2) drama since the Restoration, and (3) drama by at least some of his contemporaries. These are guesses but. should they prove demonstrably correct, far-reaching consequences might be drawn from them.
Perhaps the most discussed handled least conclusively, from taxonomic skepticism theory of illocutionary acts of Searle’s early position
issue in recent speech act theory is the one Austin that of taxonomy. As noted above, Searle moves in Speech acrs to a taxonomy tied to a general in ‘A classification of illocutionary acts’. A variant is that of Leech, who argues that illocutionary
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force ‘is not compartmentalized into discrete categories corresponding to performative or other speech act verbs’ (1980: 99). Rather, Leech argues, since some components in his speech act analysis are scalar rather than dichotomous-components such as optionality and cost/benefit (1980: 106)speech acts occupy a continuous ‘pragmatic space’ (1980: 114). But variants of Searle’s later position are far more common. In addition to Austin’s and Searle’s, taxonomies have been proposed by Schiffer (1972) Vendler (1972) Fraser (1974.1982) McCawley (1975) Bach and Harnish (1979) Verschueren (1980), Ballmer and Brennenstuhl (198 I), and Partridge (1982). One of the most remarkable, Ballmer and Brennenstuhl, results from the ‘prolonged fieldwork’ (1962: 148) Austin off-handedly proposes: ‘going through a dictionary (a concise one should do) in a liberal spirit’ (1962: 149), and noting each speech act verb, would produce a list of (Austin estimates) between one and ten thousand verbs, which might then be subdivided into families and analyzed further. Ballmer and Brennenstuhl have carried out their version of Austin’s programme and arrived at a 4800-item lexicon divided and subdivided into eight model groups, twenty-four models and typifications, and six hundred categories. The Ballmer-Brennenstuhl speech act lexicon is far wider than Austin’s would have been since they use a much wider sense of ‘speech act’ than he (indeed than do any of the other authorities consulted here). Furthermore, since the lexical tabulation was done in German rather than English, and then translated, the authors ‘cannot be absolutely sure of having taken into account “all” English speech act verbs’ (198 1: 17).2 And. perhaps owing to translation, some of their illustrative examples look fairly odd-Tire teeny acloren her acirrzirer ‘Oh’( 1981: 16). Still, used judiciously, their copious unwieldy empirical taxonomy could, like Roget’s, prove useful. More typical are the more rigorously principled taxonomies, each with five to ten categories of illocutionary force, categories partly resembling and partly differing from each other’s and Austin’s and Searle’s. The resemblances may be more noteworthy than the differences. Austin’s original category of commissives, for instance, reappears in most subsequent taxonomies. A resemblance among some recent taxonomies that distinguishes them from Austin is the initial bipartition of illocutions into (1) the communicative (Bach and Harnish) or natural (Partridge) versus (2) the conventional (Bach and Harnish) or institutional (Partridge). The analysis of Bach and Harnish is the fullest and 2 Different languages cut up pragmatic space as idiosyncratically as they do color space. Verschueren (1980: 28) illustrates the fact with an English-French-German-Dutch ‘translation network’ of to accuse: ‘you take two (or more) dictionaries. DI and D2; Dl translates from Ll (L = language) to L2, whereas D2 translates from L2 to Ll : you start from an arbitrary word (in our case an arbitrary SAV [speech act verb]) in LI and look up the L2-translations in Dl : for each you go on like that you finally get a of those translations you look up the LI-translations in D 2: if _ rather complete set of the lexical items in both languages in the domain to which the work belongs, and a good idea of the often strange overlappings between the LI and L2 sets’.
most comprehensive to date. Their six categories of illocutionary acts make up a carefully explicated and detailed taxonomy furnished with numerous subtypes, analyses, and examples. and with relations to preceding taxonomies set forth. Literary commentators may profit from the taxonomic riches that embarrass pure pragmatic theorists of a certain absolutist stripe. For there seems to be no reason why the literary commentator, free of professional obligation to arbitrate among the several taxonomies each with virtues and claims to legitimacy, shouldn’t pick and choose according to the task at hand. It seems possible. for instance. that features of any given taxonomy might be more germane to one Shakespeare play than to another. 2.4. Gricean conversarional
analj~is
In addition to its broad general influence in pragmatic theorb-. Grice’s ‘Logic and conversation’ has occasioned numerous responses, developments, and sequellae. Not all have proved very enlightening, and indeed one of the most notable disappointments is Grice himself. ‘Further notes on logic and conversation’ (1978: I 13-127). excerpted from the same lecture series as ‘Logic and conversation’ but nothing like as seminal. Many however have followed Grice’s lead to good advantage. Apparently working independently, Bach and Harnish (1979) and Leech (1980) have regularized and elucidated Grice’s (1975) cooperative principle and the conversational maxims it comprises. and provided additional masims. Studies such as Shenkein (1978) and Burton (1980) of the sociology of turn-taking and other features of the organization of conversational interaction have provided finely discriminated analyses of naturallyoccurring examples of Gricean maxims in effect in conversation. 2.3. Global and nlanijbld speed
acts
While in earlier theory ‘It was tacitly assumed that one speech act is usually accomplished by one sentence’ (Van Dijk (1981: 13)). more recent study has brought into focus how on the one hand a number of sentences embodying various subsidiary illocutions may together at the same time constitute a single global speech act. and on the other hand how with a single sentence more than one speech act may be performed. Van Dijk treats global speech acts (.macrospeech acts’) pragmatically: ‘Pragmatic theory cannot be limited to an account of single speech acts. expressed by single sentences, but also must explicate the structure of speech act sequences and global speech acts. realized by sequences of sentences of discourse and conversation.’ (1981: I-2)
As a foundation he uses his treatment of ‘macro-structures’ of discourse having especially to do with topic and coherence. He shows how identifying hierarchi-
cal illocutionary structures such as preparatory, auxiliary, and main speech act makes possible the description of single global speech acts in which numerous ‘micro-speech acts’ are embedded. Furthermore, these global illocutions may be explicit, i.e. macro-performatives, as when ‘at the beginning of a longer speech we may say I’ll give J+OU some good advice, or at the end: This is (I promise (1977: 245; cf. Partridge (1982: 34)). The corresponding possibility of using a single sentence to perform more than one illocution simultaneously, and thus by implication the general possibility of manifold speech acts performed with whatever number of sentences, has most often been considered in discussions of ‘indirect speech acts’. Searle’s analysis of how, for instance, a speaker ‘issues a directive BY WAY OF asking a question’ with the utterance Can yell puss the salt? is by now a classic treatment of a subject that has received much attention (1975: 59-82). cf. Davison (1975: 257-289) Green (1975: 107-141) and Bach and Harnish (1979: 173-202); Holdcroft (1978) uses the term ‘indirect speech act’ differently. for a small group of such acts as hinting whose illocutionary force is necessarily inexplicit). Other sorts of manifold single-sentence acts are the ‘hedged performatives’ of Fraser and the ‘collateral acts’ of Bach and Harnish. Unlike elaborations on Gricean maxims, the recent theory of global and manifold speech acts would seem to bear as much on nondramatic as on dramatic criticism. Narration. for instance, must certainly be a global act if it is usefully to be considered a speech act. Van Dijk puts the question ‘whether narration is a global speech act or not’ (1977: 245) without attempting an answer (and see Van Dijk (1975: 285) ‘Whether “narration” is a specific speech act is a question which we will not try to answer in this paper’). Discussions of narration and other possible global speech acts may bring to the fore congruences of pragmatics and classical rhetorical theory discussed by Elam, Franck. and others. Elam remarks that ‘Grice’s (descriptive) principles (...) resemble quite closely the (prescriptive) axioms for discursive decorum stated by ethical commentators in the Renaissance (...)’ (1984: 193). Franck argues for ‘a reanimation of the age-old notion of rhetoric . ..’ (1981: 225). Morpurgo-Tagliabue holds that ‘Grice (...) proposed nothing else than the rules of classical rhetoric adapted to the modern position of speech’ (1981: 505). Contrary to some reports, then, speech act theory is alive and even thriving. The second generation of theorists and analysts has for the most part consolidated gains of the first. sharpening distinctions and terminology and leaving behind most of the first generation’s nearly obligatory tentativeness. The second generation has also made considerable gains of its own. There have been some blind alleys+z.g. the short-lived abstract performative hypothesisand not all the other new work is of equal value, but large new areas of inquiry have been opened and a rich array of analysis has been marshalled, so that it
seems reasonable to espect that profitable applications of the theory lvill continue to include some in literary studies. Drama study in particular seems likely to profit from the second generation of speech act theory even more than it has done from the first. Admittedly the five topics treated above are chosen by a practicing Shakespearean. Still. the bias toward drama seems natural and inherent in the theory. and increasinglq so. Searle (1975) has addressed questions of narrativity, and certain literary theorists with a bias toward narrative, such as Pratt (1977) and Altieri (1981) have attempted to appropriate and adapt some of the first generation theory to their ends. But it is nearly impossible not to notice that the huge preponderance of illustrative examples provided by speech act theorists are bits of drama, in standard dramatic form, lvith speeches, speech headings. and occasional stage directions. And in general, as with the particular topics touched on here, pragmatically oriented speech act theory is especially appropriate to drama among genres.
3. Pragmatic First-generation
criticism speech act theory is one of the tools of analysis
used by Elam:
‘If we are able to approach the dialogue (...) as a network of direct herbal deeds (...) then w may begin to come to terms with the dynamic discourse structure of the drama in its momentby-moment unfolding.’ (1984: 6-7)
To illustrate the ‘role of the speech-act continuum’ (1984: 7). Elam describes the first encounter between Isabella and Angelo (.\leasz~refor /rIeNSllre, Il.ii.2638) in terms of an ‘utterance-by-utterance breakdown of the dialogue’ (ibid.: S) into constituent acts such as Angelo’s inquiries and Isabella’s plea. The resultant ‘rudimentary anatomy’ (ibid.: S) is useful, and it might have gone considerably farther. Isabella’s initial refusals to ansiver Angelo’s terse questions, for instance, manifest a wilfulness strikingly in contrast with the decorous subservience of her first speech to him. Of course a playgoer or reader must perform a largely unconscious running anatomy of Elam’s sort merely to follow the story; and one finds valuable unsystematic moments of speech act analysis in much-perhaps most-shakespeare criticism. Still. it would seem that speech act theory. especially as enriched and refined recently, could allow us to move beyond sketches like Elam’s to systematic, explicit, finely shaded portrayals of the continuum of a play’s verbal action. Such description could probably never be complete in any reasonable sense of the word, nor even definitive, but one can imagine substantial agreement about a far more substantial description than yet exists of Shakespeare’s characters’ speech acts. Although carrying out a full pragma-
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tic description of an entire play might be impossibly daunting, such description of portions of the text ought to be feasible. Elam proceeds no farther in this direction than the sketch discussed above. However the pragmatic focus does help him make a number of acute observations about the functions of turn-alloting signals, size-markers for speeches, rerun requests, and other devices for the managing of conversation. And in a brief section devoted to illocutionary force (ibid.: 199-212) he demonstrates or suggests additional applications of speech act theory, such as exploring correlations betlveen dramatic genre and relative frequencies of illocutionary classes.3 Thus speech act theory comes naturally to hand in Elam’s exploration of *“Discourse” (. ..) the general Shakespearean word for language in use’ (ibid.: 1). He finds drama ‘especially inviting terrain for a pragmatics of fictional discourse’ (ibid.: 177) and, while he has much to say about rhetorical figures and other linguistic features without any particular genre-valence, he is generally very much alive to the dramaticalness-the constraints imposed and the opportunities provided by the genre-of his subject. But Elam is not especially alive to or interested in the theatricalness of his subject. He is not, that is-not even in his chapter ‘Performances’-interested in performances of the plays. Hereby hangs a tale about the peculiar importance of pragmatics in contemporary Shakespeare studies. J.L. Styan. The Shnkespeare revolution (1977) charts the twentieth-century evolution of criticism away from Bradleyan ‘character study of a wholly nontheatrical kind’ (ibid.: 37), past the mid-century new-critical attention to imagery associated most notably with G. Wilson Knight. to a current stagecentered criticism foreshadowed by Granville-Barker. ‘It follows that histories and surveys of Shakespeare criticism (...) cannot hereafter ignore the events and developments that are usually collected separately in “stage histories”. Our understanding of Shakespeare today is not divisible (...)’ (ibid.: 233)
Styan cites a number of fellow Shakespeareans to the effect that ‘criticism based on a strong sense of the play as something that is incomplete until it is performed seems likely to grow in importance’ ((ibid.: 179) quoted from Wells (1971: 261), emphasis Styan). While so large an industry as current Shakespeare study resists corporate takeover by any single critical stance, the movement noted by Styan in 1977 does continue apace. 3 Elam’s gesture toward exploring correlations between genre and illocutionary class is muddled in several ways. For instance, he announces that ‘the most recurrent type of illocution performed (or at least Ienicalized) in the comedies (...) is the “transitive” class of the directive’ (1984: 201). Leaving aside the question of what an intransitive directive might be (or how a class could be transitive or intransitive), it must be said that Elam’s parenthetical amendment is disingenuous, since there is no necessary connection between illocutions named (‘lexicalized’) and those performed.
Under the circumstances, then. it would seem that the potential importance of analyses like Elam’s ‘utterance-by-utterance breakdolvn’ might IveIl be capitalized on. With a slight shift of emphasis, the value for theatrical performance of many of Elam’s observations could become clear. Though necessarily incomplete and therefore provisional, a rich precise explicit pragmatic description of a part. a scene. a play ought to be of great use to directors and actors. Conversely, since any performance embodies a generally inexplicit, more or less valid and discriminating pragmatic interpretation, actual performances ought to be of use to critics engaged in pragmatic description. Speech act theory, that is, since the entities it treats of occupy a space betbveen le,~ui~ and prnxis. or ‘between page and stage’ (Elam (1984: 33)), partaking of bothspeech act theory ought therefore to contribute to the current bridging of ‘the chasm betiveen acting and criticism’ (Styan (1977: 3)) in Shakespeare studies. It does not necessarily follow that speech act theory has as viable a place in other criticism. Probably because of Shakespeare’s stability and resilience and his continuing centrality in our culture, and certainly because of the age. size. and achievement of Shakespeare study. Shakespeareans in the l9SOs find themselves somewhat insulated from the winds of change that have aerated sediment and ruffled feathers elsewhere. While there have been important recent feminist and psychoanalytic studies of Shakespeare (cf. Jardine (1983). Erickson (I 985), Neely (I 985). Novy (1985)) and while some trial balloons in the form of post-structuralisr or deconstructionist papers or special sessions have wobbled aloft at professional meetings recently-the 1951 Annual Meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America included a two-session seminar on ‘Post-structuralist approaches to Shakespeare’-the fact remains that perspectives shift as one crosses the boundary that separates Shakespeare study from the rest of the world of literary criticism. To a Shakespearean it may feel like lea\,ing the hush and ease of the Folger Library and stepping out into the mean streets. Similar readjustment of vision is necessary for crossing the boundary separating pure pragmatics from its application in criticism. Best, worst. the time is widely perceived in the profession as one of a crisis of a different order of magnitude from ‘the Shakespearean revolution’. So man) commonplaces and pieties of the recent past have fallen that one may understandably look to an!’ coherent doctrine for a refuge or mooring. However, despite the fact that speech act theory has figured occasionally in the theoretical debates, most notably in the Searle-Derrida dispute (Derrida (1977a, 1977b). Searle (1977)). it seems unlikely to provide any safe haven for those who need one. What then are lve to make of pragmatics? What are \ve making of it:’ Assuming that our own discipline has a future, it would seem that the developing body of descriptive discriminations known as speech act theory or pragmatics might continue to play one of two parts in it. It may play the more or less decorative and supernumerary role described ten years ago by Fish:
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Speech Act theory has been sacrificed to the desire of the literary critic for a system more firmly grounded than any afforded him by his own discipline. The career of this desire always unfolds in two stages: (I) the system or theory is emptied of its content so that the distinctions it is able to make are or lost or blurred, and (2) what remains, a terminology and an empty framework, is made into a metaphor.’ (1976: 1002)
But the future need not be so melancholy for pragmatics in criticism. If critics using it conserve some measure of the best of the pure theorists’ scrupulousness and precision, and avail themselves of more of the descriptive riches elaborated since the first generation of theory, pragmatics ought to be able to do the profession some grace.
References Altieri, Charles, 1981. Act and quality: a theory of literary meaning and humanistic understanding. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Akmajian. Adrian, Richard A. Demers and Robert M. Harnish, 1979. Linguistics: an introduction to language and communication. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. (Rev. 1984.) Austin, J.L.. 1962. How to do things w-ith words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bach, Kent and Robert XI. Harnish. 1979. Linguistic communication and speech acts. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. Ballmer, Thomas T. and W’altrand Brennenstuhl, 1981. Speech act classification: a study in the lexical analysis of English speech activity verbs. Berlin: Springer Verlag. Burton. Deirdre, 1980. Dialogue and discourse: a sociolinguistic approach to modern drama dialogue and naturally occurring conversation. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Campbell. B.G., 1975. Toward a workable taxonomy of illocutionary forces. and its application to works of imaginative literature. Language and Style 8, 3-20. Carnap, Rudolf, 1942. Introduction to semantics. Cambridge. MA: M.I.T. Press, Cole. Peter (ed.). 1978. Syntax and semantics 9: Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press. Davison. Alice. 1975. Indirect speech acts and what to do with them. In: Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan (eds.), Syntax and semantics 3: Speech acts, 257-289. New York: Academic Press. Derrida, Jacques, 1977a. Signature event context. Glyph I, 172-197. Derrida, Jacques, 1977b. Limited Inc abc ___Glyph 2, 162-254. Dubrow. Heather, forthcoming 1987. Captive victors: Shakespeare’s narrative poems and sonnets. Ithaca. NY: Cornell University Press. Elam, Keir. 1984. Shakespeare’s universe of discourse: language-games in the comedies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Erickson, Peter, 1985. Patriarchal structures in Shakespeare’s drama. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fish. Stanley E., 1976. How to do things with Austin and Searle: speech act theory and literary criticism. Modern Language Notes 91. 983-1025. Franck. Dorothea, 1981. Seven sins of pragmatics: theses about speech act theory, conversational analysis. linguistics and rhetoric. In: Herman Parret, Marina Sbisa and Jef Verschueren (eds.), Possibilities and limitations of pragmatics, 227-236. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fraser, Bruce. 1974. An analysis of vernacular performative verbs. In: Roger W. Shuy and CharlesJames N. Bailey (eds.). Towards tomorrow’s linguistics, 139-158. Washington: Georgetown University Press. Fraser, Bruce. 1975. Hedged performatives. In: Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and semantics 3: Speech acts. 187-210. New York: Academic Press, Fraser, Bruce, 1982. On the status of speech act strategies. Centrum 2, S-26.
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Gazdar, Gerald, 1979. Pragmatics: implicature, presupposition. and logical form. Sew York: Academic Press. Green, Georgia M.. 1975. How to get people to do things with words: the u-himperative question. In: Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and semantics 3: Speech acts, 107-185. New York: Academic Press. Greenblatt. Stephen. 1980. Renaissance self-fashioning: from More to Shakespeare. Chicago. IL: University of Chicago Press. Grice, H.P., 1957. Meaning. The Philosophical Review 66, 377-388. Grice. H.P.. 1957. Logic and conversation. In: Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (eds.). Syntax and semantics 3: Speech acts. 41-58. New York: Academic Press. Grice, H.P.. 1978. Further notes on logic and conversation. In: Peter Cole ted.). 113-127. Habermas. Jiirgen. 1976. Some distinctions in universal pragmatics. Theory and Society 3. 155-167. Hancher. Michael. 1975. Understanding poetic speech acts, College Enghrh 36. 632-639. Hare, R.M., 1970. Meaning and speech acts. The Philosophical Review 79. 3-2-l. Holdcroft. David. 1978. Words and deeds: problems in the theory of speech acts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jardine. Lisa. 1983. Still harping on daughters: women and drama in the age of Shakespeare. Totavv. NJ: Barnes & Noble. Kates, Carol A., 1980. Pragmatics and semantics: an empiricist theory. Ithaca. SY: Cornell University Press. Lakoff. Robin T.. 1968. Abstract syntax and Latin complementation. Cambridge. >I.\: M.I.T. Press. Lanser. Susan Sniader. 1981. The narrative act: point of view in prose fiction. Princeton. SJ: Princeton University Press. Leech. Geoffrey N.. 1980. Esplorations in semantics and pragmatics. Amsterdam: John Bsnjamins. McCauley, James D.. 1968. Conversational implicature and the lexicon. In: Peter Cole (ed.). 245 259. Meyers. Robert B. and Karen Hopkins, 1977. A speech-act bibliography. Centrum 5. 73-105. Miller. J. Hillis. 1977. Ariachne’s broken woof. Georgia Review 31, 44-60. Morpurgo-Tagliabue. Guido. 1981. Grammar, logic and rhetoric in a pragmatic perspective. In: Herman Parret. Marina Sbisa and Jef Verschueren (eds.), Possibilities and limitations of pragmatics. 493-508. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Morris. Charles. 1938. Foundations of the theory of signs. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Neely. Carol Thomas. 1985. Broken nuptials in Shakespeare’s plays. New Haven. CT: Yale University Press. Navy. Marianne. 1985. Love’s argument: gender relations in Shakespeare. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Ohmann, Richard. 1971. Speech acts and the definition of literature. Philosophy and Rhetoric 4. l19. Ohmann. Richard. 1973. Literature as act. In: Seymour Chatman (ed.). Literary style. 211-25-1. New York: Columbia University Press. Ohmann. Richard. 1974. Speech, literature and the space between. New Literary History 5, 37-63. Partridge. John Geoffrey. 1982. Semantic, pragmatic and syntactic correlates: an analysis of performative verbs based on English data. Tubingen: Gunter Narr Varlag. Porter. Joseph A., 1979. The drama of speech acts: Shakespeare’s Lancastrian tetralogy Berkeley. CA: University of California Press. Pratt. Mary Louise. 1977. Toward d speech act theory of literary discourse. Bloomington. IN: University of Indiana Press. Recanati. Francois. 1981. Les enonccs performatifs: contribution a la pragmatique. Paris: Slinuit.
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Ross. John Robert. 1970. On declarative sentences. In: Roderick A. Jacobs and Peter S. Rosenbaum (eds.). Readings in English transformational grammar, 222-272. Waltham, MA: Ginn and Co. Sadock, Jerrold M.. 1970. Whimper.Jtives. In: Jerrold M. Sadock and Anthony L. Vanek (eds.). Studies presented to Robert B. Lees by his students, 223-238. Edmonton: Linguistic Research IIlC.
Sadock. Jerrold M.. 1974. Toward a linguistic theory of speech acts. New York: Academic Press. Schiffer. Stephen R.. 1972. Meaning Oxford: Oxford University Press. Searle. John R., 1969. Speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Searle, John R.. 1975a. Indirect speech acts. In: Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (eds.). Syntax and semantics 3: Speech acts. 58-82. New York: Academic Press. Searle. John R., 1975b. The logical s?atus of fictional discourse. New Literary History 6, 319-332. Searle. John R., 1976. A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society 5. l-23. Searle, John R.. 1977. Reiterating the differences: a reply to Derrida. Glyph I, 198-208. Searle, John R., 1979. Expression ar.d meaning: studies in the theory of speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seung. T.K.. 1982. Semiotics and thematics in hermeneutics. New York: Columbia University Press. Shenkein. Jim. 1978. Studies in the organization of conversational interaction. New York: Academic Press. Strawson, F.P.. 1959. Individuals: an essay in descriptive metaphysics. London: Methuen. Styan, J.L.. 1977. The Shakespeare revolution: criticism and performance in the twentieth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Dijk. Teun A.. 1975. Action, action description, narrative. New Literary History 6, 273-294. Van Dijk. Teun A.. 1977. Text and context: explorations in the semantics and pragmatics of discourse. London: Longman. Van Dijk. Teun A.. 1981. Studies in the pragmatics of discourse. New York: Mouton. Vendler. Zeno, 1972. Res cogitans: au essay in rational psychology. Ithaca. NY: Cornell University Press. Verschueren. Jef, 1976. An alternati1.e to prototype rules. Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 2. 386-395. Verschueren. Jef, 1978. Pragmatics: an annotated bibliography. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Verschueren. Jef, 1980. On speech act verbs. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Wells. Stanley, 1971. Shakespeare criticism since Bradley. In: Kenneth Muir and Samuel Schonbaum (eds.), A new companion to Shakespeare studies, 249-261. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winograd. Terry, 198-t. Computer software for working with language. Scientific American 251 (3). 131-145.
Poetics I5 (1986) 243-57 North-Holland
PRAGMATICS
FOR CRITICISM
Two Generations of Speech Act Theory Joseph
A. PORTER*
The first part of this essay reports how speech act theory. now in its second generation, looks to a Shakespearean and user of the classic, first-generation theory. I concentrate on work of the past decade or so. the pure theory as yet largely unassimilated in criticism. But first a review of firstgeneration theory is in order since, while a nodding acquaintance with such key terms as ‘performative’ is increasingly apparent in criticism at large, the nod is often merely token. and there is widespread confusion and misinformation about the originating texts. often in the very best and liveliest criticism (cf. Altieri (198 I : 7 I fT.), Greenblatt (I 980: 87). and Miller (1977: 49)). The second part of the essay turns to criticism. first discussing the peculiarly fertile ground for pragmatics provided by current Shakespeare studies, and then attempting to situate general critical pragmatics Lvith respect to some more visible critical landmarks.
1. Introduction J.L. Austin’s exposition of his theory, Hon. to rio rhirlgs pith bcorcis. the posthumous, lightly edited, and sometimes fragmentary notes for a lecture series (including a vexed sequence of provision and revision through the series) have permitted and even prompted misunderstanding, notably with the term ‘performative’.’ Austin initially observes that performatives -utterances of the form ‘I hereby VP . ..‘-- prove the logical positivist account of language inadequate since they fall into neither of its two categories, utterances with truth-value and ‘emotive-expressive-nonsensical’ utterances like Ouch! or Olivier’s Hamlet * Author’s address: J.A. Porter, Duke University, Dept. of English. Durham, North Carolina 27706, USA. ’ Partridge (1982: 29) observes that the term ‘performative’ is ‘not at all uniformly employed. This is the case even-and particularly-with Austin’. While Austin’s notorious lack of uniformity gives rise to the lack of uniformity Partridge notices, in fact kvithin pure speech act theory of the second generation thete is widespread concurrence in the Austinian usage adopted here. i.e. the restriction of ‘performative’ to explicit illocutionary acts. Fraser (1982: 7) provides a lucid characterization of the performative which generalizes Austin, abandoning his syntactic constraints but maintaining his explicitness requirements. Decidedly in the minority are such second-generation theorists as Kates (1980) and Recanati (1981). who make ‘performative’ synonymous with ‘speech act’. As adopted by literary theorists and critics the term ‘performative’ has tended to grow fuzzier.
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is escellent. Setting aside the emotive-etc. group, Austin provisionally contrasts ‘constatives’ (utterances ivith truth-value such as Shakespeare died in 1616) with performatives (utterances without truth-value in which an act is performed. such as I hereh!, christen this theater the Globe). But this distinction breaks down as Austin remarks that asserting. denying. affirming. stating that. etc.. are themselves kinds of acts that may be performed with the performative formula (as ivith I hereb!. assert that Shakespenre died in 1616). Hence Austin moves to his definitive account of what distinguishes performatives: the speech act in question-christening. denial, etc.-is done explicitly. inasmuch as the verb in the independent clause names the act the speaker performs with the utterance (1967: 61). In performing such an act, which Austin terms an ‘illocution’ or ‘illocutionar]’ act’, one also performs the act of uttering the sentence(s), the ‘locutionary act’. Furthermore. in performing both these acts one may also be performing a third kind of act done through speech, a ‘perlocution’. Thus the illocutionary act of (explicitly) urging may involve the locutionary act saying I urge J’OUto red Harder’. and the perlocutionary act of persuading you. With this much of the theory in place-and this much has stayed in place as the basis for developments to date-Austin concludes with what has proved the least satisfactory part of his theory, a taxonomy of ‘illocutionary force’. a provisional di\-ision of speech acts into five families: verdictives, exercitives. cornmissives. behabitives. and expositives. Of cornmissives, for instance. he says. ‘The whole point of a cornmissive is to commit the speaker to a certain course of action’. and he gives thirty-three examples including promise, vow, m’ecIr, and bet (1962: 156157). While some have found Austin’s goal of a taxonomy untenable (cf. Searle (1969). Verschueren (1976). Leech (1980)). commentators generally have found Austin’s goal admirable. Most however have found his attempt to realize it unacceptably arbitrary (see section 1.3 ‘Tasonomy’). John R. Searle and H.P. Grice are the two other primary exponents of classic speech act theory. In Speech acts Searle addresses Austin’s taxonomic deficiency and proposes a uniform system for describing speech acts in terms of four kinds of conditions for the felicitous performance of any speech act (1969: 66). According to this analysis each speech act type is distinct from every other by at least one condition. and no single taxonomy is privileged since the range of speech acts may be divided into various family groupings depending on constants and variables among the four conditions. But later Searle does propose a taxonomy, one of a number of revisions of Austin proposed in the past decade (cf. Searle (1976), and section 2.3 below). H.P. Grice. in Logic and conversation (1975, but widely circulated and discussed since delivery as a lecture in 1968), accounts for ‘conversational implicature’-the intended derivation by the hearer of \vhat is tacitly communicated in an utterance. Grice posits that conversationalists use a ‘Cooperative
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Principle’: ‘Make your conversational contribution such as is required . ..’ (1975: 45). To articulate the principle, Grice posits maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. The category of Quantity, for instance, is represented by two maxims, ‘Make your contribution as informative as is required’, and ‘Do not make your contribution more informative than is required’ (1975: 4.5,46). The connection between the Cooperative Principle and maxims on the one hand and ‘conversational implicature’ on the other comes from the possibility of exploiting maxims by flouting them: a speaker may: ‘(...)/Io~f a maxim: that is. he may blnranriy fail to fulfill it... This situation is one which characteristically gives rise to a conversational implicature; and when a conversational implica(1975: -l9) ture is generated in this H-a!. I shall say that a maxim is being e.y/oired.’
While Grice does not adopt wholesale the Austin-Searle speech act terminology, and while his approaches differ so notably from theirs that it could be misleading to call him a speech act theorist, in fact his conversational implicature operates by illocutionary force and his conclusions so overlap with Austin’s and Searle’s that he is customarily linked with them. Austin, Searle, and Grice, together with such early commentators and theorizers as Habermas (1976) Hare (1970) and Vendler (1972) make up classic first-generation speech act theory. It is philosophical, analytic--‘descriptive’ in the sense meant by Strawson (1959: xii)-and frequently linguistic in character. None of its exponents is much concerned with any bearing the theory might have on literary theory and criticism. But the classic speech act analysis with its rich manifold of precise discriminations has since the early 1970’s proved attractive to such scholars writing about literature as Altieri (1981) Campbell (1975) Dubrow (forthcoming), Elam (1984), Fish (1976). Hancher (1975) Lanser (1981) Ohmann (1971. 1973, 1974) Porter (1979). and Pratt (1977), and Meyers and Hopkins (1977) and Verschueren (1978) provide some coverage of critical applications of the theory. Meanwhile pure speech act theory has continued to develop, a second generation unaffected by such use as literary critics have made of the first generation. Indeed pure speech act theorists of the second generation seem quite unaware of literary critics’ use of their predecessors. More to the point here, the lack of awareness is reciprocal: literary commentators and theorists, even those most indebted to speech act theory, ignore developments in speech act theory of the past decade. When on occasion a literary theorist acknowledges life in speech act theory since 1974, it is most characteristically to dismiss that life for its unruliness, as does Altieri when he avows that ‘this field is now in turmoil’ (1981: 69). That turmoil may be in the eye of the beholderAltieri swims against the tide in his use of the term ‘performative’, although he does in general demonstrate an appreciation and understanding of first generation pragmatic theory unusual in criticism.
That the field is indeed too lively to have justice done it in a few pages may be seen from the following survey of five topics widely discussed in second-generation speech act theory: pragmatics. the performative. taxonomy, Gricean conversation analysis, and global and manifold speech acts. The topics are hardly mutually exclusive, and indeed they bear on each other in more ways than can be treated here.
2. Current issues -7.1. Pragnzarics
Although the term pragmatics dates from well before, only in the past decade has it gained wide currency. Formed in obvious parallel with the traditional levels of linguistic analysis-phonetics. syntactics. and semantics-and meant by Morris (1938) and Carnap (1942) to be joined with the second and third levels to form a triadic division of semiotics. pragmatics before Austin was little more than a desideratum. Seung (1982: 76ff.) surveys the early history of the term. Seung’s view of pragmatics as including speech act theory is now standard, although Searle (1979: 179) holds that ‘the theory of speech acts (. . .) nil1 include all of what used to be called semantics as well as pragmatics’. The enabling effect of Austin’s explorations may be seen in the comparative assurance of recent definitions of pragmatics. Leech (1980: 2) holds it to be ‘the study of the relation between linguistic signs and their users’. or. more narrowly, ‘the study of the relation between the abstract meaning or sense of linguistic expressions, and the communicative force which they have for speakers and hearers in given utterance situations’. Leech’s definitions are based on Morris, although Morris conceives of pragmatics as the study of the relation between all (including nonlinguistic) signs and their users. While Seung (1978: 77) follows Morris, speech act theorists generally agree with Leech in restricting their observations to linguistic signs. Cole (1978: ix) distinguishes ‘between semantics and pragmatics, the former having to do with what linguistic expressions mean and the latter with what speakers mean (i.e., intend to convey) by using these expressions’. Grice (1957: 377-388) early separates speaker-meaning from utterance-meaning, and Schiffer (1972) uses Grice as a point of departure for an extended account of speaker-meaning, the domain of pragmatics, as opposed to utterance-meaning, the domain of semantics. The growing legitimacy of the term marks an increasing awareness of ‘a new era in the study of meaning and grammar, one in which the issues are more complex and the problems more trying than had been imagined previously’ (Cole (1978: xii)). With respect to speech act theory, the developing study of pragmatics has illuminated areas where the theory shades into a general philosophy of action. The focus has proved especially helpful in discussions of
the key roles of convention and intention in speech acts. such as Holdcroft’s treatment of ‘Illocutionary acts and intentions’ (1978: 13 l- 137) or the subdivision by Bach and Harnish of illocutions into two categories, each with its own kind of associated intention (1979: 12-13, 108-116). And discussions of numerous narrower subjects (including numbers two through five below) have profited from the currency of the term pragmatics. Two periodicals and a monograph series have been devoted to pragmatics. and Verschueren, in Pragmcltics: an nr~notated bibliography (1978). lists over 1500 publications primarily from the preceding decade, with annual supplements scheduled in the Journal of Pragmntics. Outside pure theory, adoption and application of the category of pragmatics is proceeding apace, often most readily outside literary studies. Akmajian, Demers. and Harnish’s Linguistics contains in the first edition (1979) a chapter on ‘the very new subfield of pragmatics (...) which is not even old enough to have developed opposing schools’, and in the second edition (1984) ‘a significantly revised chapter on pragmatics’. Even in cybernetics, ‘the final stage of analysis. in a language-understanding program, is pragmatic analysis (. . .)’ (Winograd (1984: 139)). As for literary applications, according to Van Dijk (1981: 263) ‘the pragmatic analysis of literature is just beginning’. Where the term has currency in literary studies and discussion (as in special sessions at MLA Conventions over the past decade), it has already provided a useful frame of reference for matters whose interrelatedness would earlier have remained obscure or required laborious demonstration. 2.2. The performntive The peculiar animal that led Austin into the realm of speech acts has continued to interest, and in some cases to bedevil, speech act theorists of the past decade. Although for the most part they have avoided the confusion about the meaning of the term now endemic in literary studies, the performative has given them two large problem-the abstract performative hypothesis and the ‘tyranny of the performative’ (Leech (1980: 79)) in discussions of kinds of illocutionary force. The abstract performative hypothesis advanced in the early 1970s attempted to assimilate pragmatics into formal transformational-generative linguistics. According to the fullest exposition, the hypothesis ‘provides that every sentence contain as its highest deep-syntactic (and semantic) clause a structure like those that give rise to explicit performatives’, i.e. a clause containing ‘an abstract performative verb which specifies the force of the sentence . . .’ (Sadock (1974: 17) cf. Lakoff (1968), McCawley (1968) Sadock (1970) Ross (1970)). Generally associated with the hypothesis is the thesis that ‘performatives constitute the central point of language behavior and that syntactic processes are dependent on them’ (Patridge (1982: 134)). But the hypothesis, having
begged or raised more questions than it could answer, has generally been rejected by speech act theorists. Gazdar (1974) surveys objections and according to Leech ‘no one seems to believe it any more’ (1980: 59). Leech sees the rejection of the hypothesis as symptomatic of the increasingly firm foundation of speech act theory outside the walled garden of formal linguistics. Like Leech and other recent commentators, Partridge rejects the abstract performative hypothesis. He also rejects the thesis (which he attributes to Austin) ‘that there is an explicit performative for every illocutionary act’ (1982: 134). Though Austin does not advance this thesis. it grows naturally out of his taxonomic method, and is an example of ‘the tyranny of the performative’the practice of ‘assuming that corresponding to every performative verb there is an illocution’ (Leech (1980: 85)), and ricr I’USCZ. This question, unlike that of the abstract performative. has not been resolved, even by agreement to dismiss it. While the general tendency is to reject the view ‘that a performative sentence is somehow the standard explicit form in terms of which non-performatives are assigned implicit performative force . ..’ (Leech 1980: 99)) Searle and others at times reject that view far less categorically than does Leech, so that the jury is still out. The question bears importantly on Searle’s ‘Principle of Expressibility, stating that whatever can be meant can be said’ (1969: 68). and on questions of global speech acts, the discreteness of kinds of illocutionary force, and the function of explicitness. Patridge holds that ‘performativeness is not an autonomous phenomenon, but a constellation of coocurrence relationships’ (1952: 135). Holdcroft (1978: 61-63. 1699170) commits himself to denying that illocutionary force can be made explicit. but his denial is less than full-blooded. Verschueren posits a ‘performativity continuum’ (1980: 17) rather than a sharp distinction between performative verbs and non-performative speech act verbs. Austin’s airy if plausible speculations about a late development of explicitness in the evolution of language (1962: 145) suggest attention to literary performativeness as a function of period. = oenre, and writer. It vvould seetn safe, for instance, to wager that performatives are more common in Shakespeare’s drama than in (1) narrative works, including his own, of whatever period, (2) drama since the Restoration, and (3) drama by at least some of his contemporaries. These are guesses but. should they prove demonstrably correct, far-reaching consequences might be drawn from them.
Perhaps the most discussed handled least conclusively, from taxonomic skepticism theory of illocutionary acts of Searle’s early position
issue in recent speech act theory is the one Austin that of taxonomy. As noted above, Searle moves in Speech acrs to a taxonomy tied to a general in ‘A classification of illocutionary acts’. A variant is that of Leech, who argues that illocutionary
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force ‘is not compartmentalized into discrete categories corresponding to performative or other speech act verbs’ (1980: 99). Rather, Leech argues, since some components in his speech act analysis are scalar rather than dichotomous-components such as optionality and cost/benefit (1980: 106)speech acts occupy a continuous ‘pragmatic space’ (1980: 114). But variants of Searle’s later position are far more common. In addition to Austin’s and Searle’s, taxonomies have been proposed by Schiffer (1972) Vendler (1972) Fraser (1974.1982) McCawley (1975) Bach and Harnish (1979) Verschueren (1980), Ballmer and Brennenstuhl (198 I), and Partridge (1982). One of the most remarkable, Ballmer and Brennenstuhl, results from the ‘prolonged fieldwork’ (1962: 148) Austin off-handedly proposes: ‘going through a dictionary (a concise one should do) in a liberal spirit’ (1962: 149), and noting each speech act verb, would produce a list of (Austin estimates) between one and ten thousand verbs, which might then be subdivided into families and analyzed further. Ballmer and Brennenstuhl have carried out their version of Austin’s programme and arrived at a 4800-item lexicon divided and subdivided into eight model groups, twenty-four models and typifications, and six hundred categories. The Ballmer-Brennenstuhl speech act lexicon is far wider than Austin’s would have been since they use a much wider sense of ‘speech act’ than he (indeed than do any of the other authorities consulted here). Furthermore, since the lexical tabulation was done in German rather than English, and then translated, the authors ‘cannot be absolutely sure of having taken into account “all” English speech act verbs’ (198 1: 17).2 And. perhaps owing to translation, some of their illustrative examples look fairly odd-Tire teeny acloren her acirrzirer ‘Oh’( 1981: 16). Still, used judiciously, their copious unwieldy empirical taxonomy could, like Roget’s, prove useful. More typical are the more rigorously principled taxonomies, each with five to ten categories of illocutionary force, categories partly resembling and partly differing from each other’s and Austin’s and Searle’s. The resemblances may be more noteworthy than the differences. Austin’s original category of commissives, for instance, reappears in most subsequent taxonomies. A resemblance among some recent taxonomies that distinguishes them from Austin is the initial bipartition of illocutions into (1) the communicative (Bach and Harnish) or natural (Partridge) versus (2) the conventional (Bach and Harnish) or institutional (Partridge). The analysis of Bach and Harnish is the fullest and 2 Different languages cut up pragmatic space as idiosyncratically as they do color space. Verschueren (1980: 28) illustrates the fact with an English-French-German-Dutch ‘translation network’ of to accuse: ‘you take two (or more) dictionaries. DI and D2; Dl translates from Ll (L = language) to L2, whereas D2 translates from L2 to Ll : you start from an arbitrary word (in our case an arbitrary SAV [speech act verb]) in LI and look up the L2-translations in Dl : for each you go on like that you finally get a of those translations you look up the LI-translations in D 2: if _ rather complete set of the lexical items in both languages in the domain to which the work belongs, and a good idea of the often strange overlappings between the LI and L2 sets’.
most comprehensive to date. Their six categories of illocutionary acts make up a carefully explicated and detailed taxonomy furnished with numerous subtypes, analyses, and examples. and with relations to preceding taxonomies set forth. Literary commentators may profit from the taxonomic riches that embarrass pure pragmatic theorists of a certain absolutist stripe. For there seems to be no reason why the literary commentator, free of professional obligation to arbitrate among the several taxonomies each with virtues and claims to legitimacy, shouldn’t pick and choose according to the task at hand. It seems possible. for instance. that features of any given taxonomy might be more germane to one Shakespeare play than to another. 2.4. Gricean conversarional
analj~is
In addition to its broad general influence in pragmatic theorb-. Grice’s ‘Logic and conversation’ has occasioned numerous responses, developments, and sequellae. Not all have proved very enlightening, and indeed one of the most notable disappointments is Grice himself. ‘Further notes on logic and conversation’ (1978: I 13-127). excerpted from the same lecture series as ‘Logic and conversation’ but nothing like as seminal. Many however have followed Grice’s lead to good advantage. Apparently working independently, Bach and Harnish (1979) and Leech (1980) have regularized and elucidated Grice’s (1975) cooperative principle and the conversational maxims it comprises. and provided additional masims. Studies such as Shenkein (1978) and Burton (1980) of the sociology of turn-taking and other features of the organization of conversational interaction have provided finely discriminated analyses of naturallyoccurring examples of Gricean maxims in effect in conversation. 2.3. Global and nlanijbld speed
acts
While in earlier theory ‘It was tacitly assumed that one speech act is usually accomplished by one sentence’ (Van Dijk (1981: 13)). more recent study has brought into focus how on the one hand a number of sentences embodying various subsidiary illocutions may together at the same time constitute a single global speech act. and on the other hand how with a single sentence more than one speech act may be performed. Van Dijk treats global speech acts (.macrospeech acts’) pragmatically: ‘Pragmatic theory cannot be limited to an account of single speech acts. expressed by single sentences, but also must explicate the structure of speech act sequences and global speech acts. realized by sequences of sentences of discourse and conversation.’ (1981: I-2)
As a foundation he uses his treatment of ‘macro-structures’ of discourse having especially to do with topic and coherence. He shows how identifying hierarchi-
cal illocutionary structures such as preparatory, auxiliary, and main speech act makes possible the description of single global speech acts in which numerous ‘micro-speech acts’ are embedded. Furthermore, these global illocutions may be explicit, i.e. macro-performatives, as when ‘at the beginning of a longer speech we may say I’ll give J+OU some good advice, or at the end: This is (I promise (1977: 245; cf. Partridge (1982: 34)). The corresponding possibility of using a single sentence to perform more than one illocution simultaneously, and thus by implication the general possibility of manifold speech acts performed with whatever number of sentences, has most often been considered in discussions of ‘indirect speech acts’. Searle’s analysis of how, for instance, a speaker ‘issues a directive BY WAY OF asking a question’ with the utterance Can yell puss the salt? is by now a classic treatment of a subject that has received much attention (1975: 59-82). cf. Davison (1975: 257-289) Green (1975: 107-141) and Bach and Harnish (1979: 173-202); Holdcroft (1978) uses the term ‘indirect speech act’ differently. for a small group of such acts as hinting whose illocutionary force is necessarily inexplicit). Other sorts of manifold single-sentence acts are the ‘hedged performatives’ of Fraser and the ‘collateral acts’ of Bach and Harnish. Unlike elaborations on Gricean maxims, the recent theory of global and manifold speech acts would seem to bear as much on nondramatic as on dramatic criticism. Narration. for instance, must certainly be a global act if it is usefully to be considered a speech act. Van Dijk puts the question ‘whether narration is a global speech act or not’ (1977: 245) without attempting an answer (and see Van Dijk (1975: 285) ‘Whether “narration” is a specific speech act is a question which we will not try to answer in this paper’). Discussions of narration and other possible global speech acts may bring to the fore congruences of pragmatics and classical rhetorical theory discussed by Elam, Franck. and others. Elam remarks that ‘Grice’s (descriptive) principles (...) resemble quite closely the (prescriptive) axioms for discursive decorum stated by ethical commentators in the Renaissance (...)’ (1984: 193). Franck argues for ‘a reanimation of the age-old notion of rhetoric . ..’ (1981: 225). Morpurgo-Tagliabue holds that ‘Grice (...) proposed nothing else than the rules of classical rhetoric adapted to the modern position of speech’ (1981: 505). Contrary to some reports, then, speech act theory is alive and even thriving. The second generation of theorists and analysts has for the most part consolidated gains of the first. sharpening distinctions and terminology and leaving behind most of the first generation’s nearly obligatory tentativeness. The second generation has also made considerable gains of its own. There have been some blind alleys+z.g. the short-lived abstract performative hypothesisand not all the other new work is of equal value, but large new areas of inquiry have been opened and a rich array of analysis has been marshalled, so that it
seems reasonable to espect that profitable applications of the theory lvill continue to include some in literary studies. Drama study in particular seems likely to profit from the second generation of speech act theory even more than it has done from the first. Admittedly the five topics treated above are chosen by a practicing Shakespearean. Still. the bias toward drama seems natural and inherent in the theory. and increasinglq so. Searle (1975) has addressed questions of narrativity, and certain literary theorists with a bias toward narrative, such as Pratt (1977) and Altieri (1981) have attempted to appropriate and adapt some of the first generation theory to their ends. But it is nearly impossible not to notice that the huge preponderance of illustrative examples provided by speech act theorists are bits of drama, in standard dramatic form, lvith speeches, speech headings. and occasional stage directions. And in general, as with the particular topics touched on here, pragmatically oriented speech act theory is especially appropriate to drama among genres.
3. Pragmatic First-generation
criticism speech act theory is one of the tools of analysis
used by Elam:
‘If we are able to approach the dialogue (...) as a network of direct herbal deeds (...) then w may begin to come to terms with the dynamic discourse structure of the drama in its momentby-moment unfolding.’ (1984: 6-7)
To illustrate the ‘role of the speech-act continuum’ (1984: 7). Elam describes the first encounter between Isabella and Angelo (.\leasz~refor /rIeNSllre, Il.ii.2638) in terms of an ‘utterance-by-utterance breakdown of the dialogue’ (ibid.: S) into constituent acts such as Angelo’s inquiries and Isabella’s plea. The resultant ‘rudimentary anatomy’ (ibid.: S) is useful, and it might have gone considerably farther. Isabella’s initial refusals to ansiver Angelo’s terse questions, for instance, manifest a wilfulness strikingly in contrast with the decorous subservience of her first speech to him. Of course a playgoer or reader must perform a largely unconscious running anatomy of Elam’s sort merely to follow the story; and one finds valuable unsystematic moments of speech act analysis in much-perhaps most-shakespeare criticism. Still. it would seem that speech act theory. especially as enriched and refined recently, could allow us to move beyond sketches like Elam’s to systematic, explicit, finely shaded portrayals of the continuum of a play’s verbal action. Such description could probably never be complete in any reasonable sense of the word, nor even definitive, but one can imagine substantial agreement about a far more substantial description than yet exists of Shakespeare’s characters’ speech acts. Although carrying out a full pragma-
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tic description of an entire play might be impossibly daunting, such description of portions of the text ought to be feasible. Elam proceeds no farther in this direction than the sketch discussed above. However the pragmatic focus does help him make a number of acute observations about the functions of turn-alloting signals, size-markers for speeches, rerun requests, and other devices for the managing of conversation. And in a brief section devoted to illocutionary force (ibid.: 199-212) he demonstrates or suggests additional applications of speech act theory, such as exploring correlations betlveen dramatic genre and relative frequencies of illocutionary classes.3 Thus speech act theory comes naturally to hand in Elam’s exploration of *“Discourse” (. ..) the general Shakespearean word for language in use’ (ibid.: 1). He finds drama ‘especially inviting terrain for a pragmatics of fictional discourse’ (ibid.: 177) and, while he has much to say about rhetorical figures and other linguistic features without any particular genre-valence, he is generally very much alive to the dramaticalness-the constraints imposed and the opportunities provided by the genre-of his subject. But Elam is not especially alive to or interested in the theatricalness of his subject. He is not, that is-not even in his chapter ‘Performances’-interested in performances of the plays. Hereby hangs a tale about the peculiar importance of pragmatics in contemporary Shakespeare studies. J.L. Styan. The Shnkespeare revolution (1977) charts the twentieth-century evolution of criticism away from Bradleyan ‘character study of a wholly nontheatrical kind’ (ibid.: 37), past the mid-century new-critical attention to imagery associated most notably with G. Wilson Knight. to a current stagecentered criticism foreshadowed by Granville-Barker. ‘It follows that histories and surveys of Shakespeare criticism (...) cannot hereafter ignore the events and developments that are usually collected separately in “stage histories”. Our understanding of Shakespeare today is not divisible (...)’ (ibid.: 233)
Styan cites a number of fellow Shakespeareans to the effect that ‘criticism based on a strong sense of the play as something that is incomplete until it is performed seems likely to grow in importance’ ((ibid.: 179) quoted from Wells (1971: 261), emphasis Styan). While so large an industry as current Shakespeare study resists corporate takeover by any single critical stance, the movement noted by Styan in 1977 does continue apace. 3 Elam’s gesture toward exploring correlations between genre and illocutionary class is muddled in several ways. For instance, he announces that ‘the most recurrent type of illocution performed (or at least Ienicalized) in the comedies (...) is the “transitive” class of the directive’ (1984: 201). Leaving aside the question of what an intransitive directive might be (or how a class could be transitive or intransitive), it must be said that Elam’s parenthetical amendment is disingenuous, since there is no necessary connection between illocutions named (‘lexicalized’) and those performed.
Under the circumstances, then. it would seem that the potential importance of analyses like Elam’s ‘utterance-by-utterance breakdolvn’ might IveIl be capitalized on. With a slight shift of emphasis, the value for theatrical performance of many of Elam’s observations could become clear. Though necessarily incomplete and therefore provisional, a rich precise explicit pragmatic description of a part. a scene. a play ought to be of great use to directors and actors. Conversely, since any performance embodies a generally inexplicit, more or less valid and discriminating pragmatic interpretation, actual performances ought to be of use to critics engaged in pragmatic description. Speech act theory, that is, since the entities it treats of occupy a space betbveen le,~ui~ and prnxis. or ‘between page and stage’ (Elam (1984: 33)), partaking of bothspeech act theory ought therefore to contribute to the current bridging of ‘the chasm betiveen acting and criticism’ (Styan (1977: 3)) in Shakespeare studies. It does not necessarily follow that speech act theory has as viable a place in other criticism. Probably because of Shakespeare’s stability and resilience and his continuing centrality in our culture, and certainly because of the age. size. and achievement of Shakespeare study. Shakespeareans in the l9SOs find themselves somewhat insulated from the winds of change that have aerated sediment and ruffled feathers elsewhere. While there have been important recent feminist and psychoanalytic studies of Shakespeare (cf. Jardine (1983). Erickson (I 985), Neely (I 985). Novy (1985)) and while some trial balloons in the form of post-structuralisr or deconstructionist papers or special sessions have wobbled aloft at professional meetings recently-the 1951 Annual Meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America included a two-session seminar on ‘Post-structuralist approaches to Shakespeare’-the fact remains that perspectives shift as one crosses the boundary that separates Shakespeare study from the rest of the world of literary criticism. To a Shakespearean it may feel like lea\,ing the hush and ease of the Folger Library and stepping out into the mean streets. Similar readjustment of vision is necessary for crossing the boundary separating pure pragmatics from its application in criticism. Best, worst. the time is widely perceived in the profession as one of a crisis of a different order of magnitude from ‘the Shakespearean revolution’. So man) commonplaces and pieties of the recent past have fallen that one may understandably look to an!’ coherent doctrine for a refuge or mooring. However, despite the fact that speech act theory has figured occasionally in the theoretical debates, most notably in the Searle-Derrida dispute (Derrida (1977a, 1977b). Searle (1977)). it seems unlikely to provide any safe haven for those who need one. What then are lve to make of pragmatics? What are \ve making of it:’ Assuming that our own discipline has a future, it would seem that the developing body of descriptive discriminations known as speech act theory or pragmatics might continue to play one of two parts in it. It may play the more or less decorative and supernumerary role described ten years ago by Fish:
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Speech Act theory has been sacrificed to the desire of the literary critic for a system more firmly grounded than any afforded him by his own discipline. The career of this desire always unfolds in two stages: (I) the system or theory is emptied of its content so that the distinctions it is able to make are or lost or blurred, and (2) what remains, a terminology and an empty framework, is made into a metaphor.’ (1976: 1002)
But the future need not be so melancholy for pragmatics in criticism. If critics using it conserve some measure of the best of the pure theorists’ scrupulousness and precision, and avail themselves of more of the descriptive riches elaborated since the first generation of theory, pragmatics ought to be able to do the profession some grace.
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