The speech act status of incitement: Perlocutionary acts revisited

]olmutllff ELSEVIER

Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

The speech act status of incitement: Perlocutionary acts revisited Dennis Kurzon

English Department, Haifa University, IL-31905 Haifa, Israel Received 5 May 1996; revised version 13 May 1997

Abstract The article is a two-pronged study. From the initial assumption that the act of incitement is a perlocutionary act, which depends for its success on hearer cooperation, it is shown that what makes a speech act an act of incitement depends solely on its interpretation in the situation in which it is performed; the hearer may be the potential object of the speech act, but its performance occurs without his/her active participation. This analysis for incitement conforms with its status in legal discourse. The second, wider, issue is the entire question of perlocutionary acts and their place in speech act theory in particular and in pragmatics in general. On the basis of an analysis of the act of persuasion as well as of that of incitement, it seems that what is of concern to pragmatics is the illocutionary act with the speaker's purpose as an integral part, while the actual effect on the hearer is not a necessary condition.

1. Introduction Austin in the initial stages of setting up the original version of speech act theory (in the posthumous How to do things with words) uses clear-cut cases of performatives from the legal or institutional world to illustrate the points he is making. His first set of examples is (Austin, 1976: 5): (1) I I I I

do (sc. take this woman to be m y lawful wedded wife). name this ship the Queen Elizabeth. give and bequeath m y watch to my brother. bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow.

The first three are obvious institutional performatives, requiring a specific setting and authorized persons, for example a priest (in the first one), a shipbuilding yard (in the second), and a person who has a watch and a brother (in the third). The performative of betting, on the other hand, is not institutional, although, within the domain 0378-2166/98/$19.00 © 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved PII S0378-2166(97)00083-0

572

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

of legal betting (in a betting shop, for example), people may be held responsible for having placed a bet. Later, Austin suggests that performatives need not always be in the canonical form 'lst person + verb in present simple tense', but passive constructions are also possible. These he illustrates again from the institutional world (Austin, 1976: 57): (2) You are hereby authorized to pay ... Passengers are warned to cross the track by the bridge only. Notice is hereby given that trespassers will be prosecuted. The occurrence of the adverb hereby in the first and the third examples, as well as its potential occurrence in the second one (viz. 'Passengers are hereby warned ...'), is an explicit indication that the utterance is a performative (Kurzon, 1986: 7). There are two aims to this paper. The first aim is to investigate the speech act status of incitement, and the second, broader, aim is to examine the concept of the perlocutionary act, and in particular whether it has a function in speech act theory in particular, and in pragmatics in general. In order to reach some preliminary conclusion on both these points, 'incitement' is to be regarded, initially at least, as a perlocutionary act, and one that may be defmed principally within the legal world. It will be asked whether such a speech act (or a complex speech act, as is usually the case) is in fact a perlocutionary act, or an illocutionary act only. Perlocutionary acts have always been problematic, mainly because they may not be, and have not been, considered linguistic or pragmatic in essence; they are often seen as phenomena outside the framework of linguistic analysis. It may be argued that perlocutionary acts should be seen, even from a linguistic perspective, as phenomena within the domain of sociolinguistics and social interaction, such as Gu has recently proposed (Gu, 1993). Another possibility is that the study of perlocutionary acts is part of social psychology, which also deals with a perfectly legal counterpart of incitement - persuasion (see section 2 below for a discussion). Just as Austin's legal examples of performatives constitute a very small proportion of possible performatives and of illocutionary acts in general, one solution with regard to the act of incitement is that it is not an everyday speech act, but exists only within the framework of the law. Therefore, if we continue that line of argument, examining the speech act status of incitement within pragmatic parameters may serve no purpose. If we want to apply speech act theory to incitement, it may be only as an exercise to examine whether there may exist a relationship between legal discourse and everyday discourse (for the treatment of speech acts in legal discourse, see, e.g., Kurzon, 1986, Maley, 1994, Trosborg, 1995). However, in the same way as Austin's legal or institutional examples of performatives had shed considerable light on speech acts, the examination of what may be termed a legally defined perlocutionary act may also clarify the status of perlocutionary acts. As indicated above, the status of perlocutionary acts has been problematic ever since Austin introduced the concept in How to do things with words. His statement that "the perlocutionary act always includes some consequences, as when we say 'By doing x I was doing y ' " (1976: 107) introduces the principal problem in defin-

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

573

ing perlocutionary acts: what is to be included under consequences? Partly to solve the problem, Austin goes on to distinguish perlocutionary object and perlocutionary sequel, but even that runs into problems: "The perlocutionaryact may be either the achievementof a pedocutionary object (convince, persuade) or the production of a pedocutionary sequel. Thus the act of warning may achieve its perlocutionary object of alerting and also have the perlocutionary sequel of alarming. [...] What is the perlocutionary object of one illocution may be the sequel of another. For example, warning may produce the sequel of deterring and saying 'Don't', whose object is to deter, may produce the sequel of altering or even alarming." (Austin, 1976: 118) That is, the perlocutionary act should include the purpose of the speaker in itself, as part of its meaning - what Austin terms the perlocutionary object; for example, the speaker intends to persuade someone to do something. But as a result of the speaker's attempt to persuade the hearer, the latter may react in a totally different manner, by ignoring the speaker, or even by throwing him/her out. That is obviously not the initial purpose of the speaker, but it might be the ultimate consequence of the speaker's attempt to persuade. Of course, we are dealing with an extreme situation, but arguments against the inclusion of perlocutionary acts in speech act theory, and perhaps in pragmatics too, draw attention to the countless number of possible consequences of an alleged perlocutionary act. Some of them may be desired by the speaker, but most of them the speaker could not predict. Davis (1980) discusses various consequences of saying to someone: (3) There's a spider on your lap. He lists six (the terms in square brackets have been added): 1. I tell you that there's a spider on your lap by uttering 'There's aspider on your lap'. [illocutionary act] 2. I mean by 'There's a spider on your lap' what it means in English. [i.e. the semantic structure] 3. You understand that I have told you something by uttering 'There's a spider on your lap'. [basic communicative act] 4. You understand what I mean by 'There's a spider on your lap'. [perlocutionary uptake] 5. What you understand me to mean causes you to become frightened. [perlocutionary effect] 6. I intend that you become frightened because you understand what I mean. [intended perlocutionary effect or object in Austin]. However, Gu, in his critique of Davis' approach (Gu, 1993), adds five more: 1. Hearer (H) was frightened by the mere mentioning of the word 'spider'. H did not even check whether there really were any spiders on his/her lap.

574

D. Kurzon /Journal of Pragrnatics 29 (1998) 571-596

2. H was frightened by his/her understanding that there was a spider on his/her lap. Being frightened took place before H actually saw the creature on his/her lap. H reacted on the belief that S was telling the truth. 3, H was not initially frightened because s/he did not believe that S was telling the truth until s/he saw the creature on his/her lap. 4. H was not frightened, for s/he thought that S was kidding, and indeed it was the case. 5. H was not frightened but delighted at the news, for s/he was a spider collector. This is just a short sample of possible consequences of someone saying the original utterance 'There's a spider on your lap'. Hence, we have to distinguish between the speaker's purpose as to the perlocutionary effect, that is the perlocutionary goal as Leech (1983) terms it (see section 2 below), and the actual effect if it is not merely a rejection by the hearer of the speaker's purpose. If a speaker attempts to persuade a hearer to buy a certain washing powder, but does not succeed, and no other consequence materializes, this can be taken as an unsuccessful perlocutionary act, for successful acts reflect the achievement of the speaker's communicative goals (Davis, 1980: 53). There are conventional ways of achieving such goals; for example, if a speaker requests a certain action from the hearer, s/he would use an interrogative, which is the prototypical structure used to express a request (1980: 47). Any other consequence is not part of the intention of the speaker and, says Davis, is outside the realm of pragmatics (1980: 53). If this is the stand we are taking, then we may still talk of perlocutionary acts within speech act theory, but we have to limit the definition of perlocutionary effect not to the actual effect on the hearer, but primarily to the effect intended by the speaker, and only secondarily, if at all, to its materialization or otherwise (it is either a successful or an unsuccessful perlocutionary act). That is, we should relate to the perlocutionary goal only. If so, how do we deal with Gu's approach (1993) in which he argues for perlocutionary acts to be considered in terms of verbal transaction? The effects of an utterance, Gu claims, should not be explained in terms of causation or acts performed by the speaker, but they "ought to be explained in transactional terms with the recognition of hearers as agents of the effects" (1993: 423). To say that the speaker is fully responsible for a successful act of persuasion denies the hearer the status of an independent agent; in fact, the hearer becomes an automaton. On the contrary, the hearer must be regarded, according to Gu, as an active participant in the transaction. A successful perlocutionary act means a change in the hearer's mental attitude: "We may conclude, with some reservationperhaps, that the addressee's understanding of sense, his/her recognition of force and his/her inferring of implicature are not merely happenings caused to take place in him/her, but they are things that s/he does, though they may be invisibleto the naked eye." (Gu, 1993: 422) If the success or otherwise of a perlocutionary act depends solely on the speaker, it may be only the bearer's automatic, unintentional, motor responses that constitute the consequential effect of the speaker's saying something. But this response may

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

575

not be the one intended by the speaker; it is not the desired perlocutionary effect. That can come about only by the hearer's adopting an active role in the transaction, and the net result will be a successful act of persuasion - a successful perlocutionary act. Hence, "the perlocutionary act cannot be said to be performed by the S[peaker] alone. It is a joint endeavour between S[peaker] and H[earer]. It involves S[peaker]'s performance of speech acts and H[earer]'s performance of response-acts." (Gu, 1993: 422)

The hearer is the agent of the perlocutionary effect or effects (1993: 423). Therefore, Gu concludes, "the interactive relation between S[peaker] and H[earer] is linguistic and communicative" (1993: 427). Gu then sees perlocutionary acts within the domain of pragmatics (or perhaps more precisely sociopragmatics, but pragmatics all the same). At this stage then, we have two approaches to an attempt to bring perlocutionary acts within the fold of speech act theory, and within pragmatics in general. Firstly, it is the effect intended by the speaker that is involved in a perlocutionary act, and its success or otherwise, not a myriad of other effects that were not intended, though they may well have been predicted. Bach and Hamish (1979) seem to suggest this approach. They posit the following perlocutionary intentions that correlate with illocutionary intents; any other effect need not be considered pragmatically relevant: Constative: Directive: Commissive: Acknowledgment:

that that that that

H H H H

believe (intend believe believe

that P. to) do A. S intends to fulfil his obligation to do A. S has the appropriate feeling.

The second approach is the one suggested by Gu (1993) in which perlocutionary acts may be seen only in terms of verbal transaction; it takes two to make a perlocutionary act - the speaker and the hearer. Gu's approach is more pragmatic in the everyday sense than the other speech act approach, for he does not pay lip-service either to speakers or, more especially, to hearers; the latter are now important participants in the speech act and in its analysis. But again, we may go back to one of the primary questions: what constitutes a perlocutionary act? Even if the success of such an act depends on the hearer's response, the original utterance is still usually regarded as the perlocutionary act itself.

2. Persuasion and other perlocutionary acts To attempt to answer the question posed above, let us examine the paradigmatic case of a perlocutionary act - persuasion. 1 Given two participants, the speaker and 1 We cannot really say the prototypic perlocutionary verb, because that would imply a substantial number of members of a given set, some of which are more typical representatives of that set than others; in light of the problems concerning perlocutionary acts, the number of indisputable (?) pedocutionary verbs is very small.

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

576

the hearer, the speaker uses speech in order to persuade the hearer, say, to buy a certain washing powder. If the hearer is persuaded, we may refer to that event (assuming that being persuaded is some sort of mental act, see below) in the following way: (4)

S persuaded H to buy Snowy washing powder.

but not (4a) *S and H persuaded to buy Snowy washing powder. nor (4b) *S persuaded to buy Snowy washing powder, and H did. That is to say, the verb persuade is a transitive verb and therefore needs an object the person who has been persuaded - and a verb phrase complement. That is correct in syntactic terms; but in semantic/pragmatic terms, steering away from speech act verb classification as the basis for the argument, we say that the act of persuasion has three components. These are the act itself and two arguments: the person who does the persuading and the person who is persuaded. 2 Assuming the above, we conclude that while two people are essential in the act of persuasion, the way the act is performed is that the speaker performs the speech act of persuasion, although one of its success conditions is the desired response of the hearer. And the same is true for other apparently unproblematic perlocutionary acts, for example, alarming and intimidating. The question may arise, however, whether we are not becoming involved in a circular argument here, since there may not be any unproblematic perlocutionary act. The frequently cited 'try to-test' to distinguish perlocutionary acts from plain illocutionary acts does not always work (Leech, 1983). If we compare (5a) and (5b), (5a) I convinced her to buy Snowy washing powder. (5b) I tried to convince her to buy Snowy washing powder. 2 From the examples used in this exposition, it may seem that the present analysis is language-specific, and universal conclusions that are based solely on that reflect in reality what is acceptable or unacceptable in that one language - English. Though the examples are in English, and as such include comments concerning English syntax and lexical phenomena such as collocation, the analysis is not of speech acts verbs, one of the weaknesses of many studies in speech act theory, but of speech acts themselves. In other words, though I present examples with the verb persuade, and necessarily relate to its syntax, etc., what I want to illustrate is the perlocutionary act of persuasion. There may be languages in which the equivalent verb with the meaning 'persuade' is intransitive, in Hebrew for example, in which hu meSakhne 'a, literally meaning 'he persuades', may be glossed by 'he is persuasive', allowing, therefore, for the non-occurrence of an object, which would be required if the verb were transitive. In English, one way of leaving out the object (i.e. the NP complement referring to the person persuaded) is by means of the adjectives persuasive or convincing, as in 'he is persuasive' or 'your argument is convincing', but underlying such utterances is a potential object, the person or persons known or unknown (e.g. the general public) who are at the receiving end of an act of persuasion.

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

577

it seems quite clear that the second utterance (5b) with tried to indicates an unsuccessful act of persuasion. Or does it? Certainly, if we compare the above pair of sentences with the following pair, (6a) I asked her to buy Snowy washing powder. (6b) I tried to ask her to buy Snowy washing powder. the distinction is clear. In both of the utterances in the first pair (5), the speaker said something to the hearer, even in the case of the unsuccessful perlocutionary act. Neither of them may be given a reading that the speaker was looking for her in order to say something to her which would persuade her to buy the washing powder. The second utterance (5b) simply means that speech took place but its intended pedocutionary effect did not materialize. Hence, 'I tried to convince her, but [I did not succeed because] I did not manage to speak to her' is odd, to say the least. In the second utterance of the second pair (6b), however, the speaker may or may not have actually asked the question; s/he could have attempted to communicate with the object ('her'), but was unsuccessful, because, for example, the speaker could not find her, or s/he could have communicated with her, but did not receive any response. Leech analyses the following pair of sentences to illustrate the ambiguity of 'tried to', with the assumption that report and tell are to a certain extent synonymous, and are possible pedocutionary verbs (Leech, 1983: 204): (7a) Sir Bors tried to report to the king that the battle was lost. (7b) Sir Bors tried to tell the king that the battle was lost. The first sentence suggests that Sir Bors could not find the king or even an audience (i.e. this is a case of illocutionary failure), while the second one suggests perlocutionary failure - he could not get the king to accept the truth of the report. Does that mean, then, that tell is a perlocutionary verb? The answer is surely negative, for we may say: (8) I told him the story but he wouldn't listen. The hearer is not an active participant at all, but the telling took place - an illocutionary act occurred. Whatever was said to him went in at one ear and out at the other. Another possible candidate for the status of a perlocutionary verb is inform. Compare (9a) and (9b):

(9a) I informed him of his rights. (9b) I tried to inform him of his rights. The first one, (9a), assumes that the addressee received the message and understood it (we may have to add here something like: 'which is legally assumed'; see problems of suspects understanding their rights recited to them on arrest, e.g. Kurzon,

578

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

1996). The second one, (9b), seems to indicate either that the speaker was prevented from informing the addressee because of some obstacle, physical or otherwise, or that the latter would not listen or would interrupt when the speaker was reading out the hearer's rights. The act of informing has gone sour or has misfired. But assuming that the hearer has been informed, and that she (in the next example) is in a different state of knowledge than she was before, we may still say: (10) I informed her about the delay, but she forgot. That is, the act of informing has been successful, but some time later the information the hearer had acquired must have floated into a region in the hearer's mind to which she does not have immediate or easy access. Now, let us use persuade, which from all accounts is, with the almost synonymous convince, 3 the paradigmatic perlocutionary verb: (11) I persuaded her to buy Snowy washing powder, but she forgot to buy it. Is this acceptable? If a successful act of persuasion entails an appropriate action on the part of the hearer, the above sentence does not seem to fulfil that condition. But if it is acceptable, then we have a problem on our hands. If persuasion may be seen as a mental act only, then in that the speaker was successful. The speaker's speech acts used to persuade the hearer have caused a change in the hearer's mental attitude, and this may be enough for a successful persuasion. After all, we may say: (12) I persuaded [or convinced] her that Snowy washing powder is the best on the market, but she forgot to buy a packet. The persuasion in (12) is expressly a successful attempt to change the hearer's mental state, and the subsequent forgetfulness may be said not to be part of the persuasion. The speaker did not persuade her to buy a packet, only to agree with him/her that Snowy is the best on the market. Hearer may still use another detergent by force of habit, or perhaps because another detergent is cheaper, but she still agrees with the speaker that Snowy is the best. Similarly, one may say: (13) You have persuaded me that the social democratic party is better than the liberal party, but I will still vote for the liberal party, as I have been doing for the last twenty years. The acceptability of these sentences also raises another question concerning perlocutionary effects. If the speaker is in the process of persuading the hearer to buy 3 Thereare syntactic differences between them, e.g. convince takes a PP complement with of, while persuade does not, cf. 'I convinced her of my love' and *'I persuaded her of my love', and of course subtle semantic distinctions, for example, persuasion implies speech, while conviction does not (Wierzbicka, 1987: 63-64).

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

579

Snowy washing powder, when does s/he know whether s/he is successful or not? Does the speaker need some sign from the hearer to indicate that the act of persuasion has been successful or otherwise? So far, we have been talking of the change in the hearer's mental state. But how may we ascertain whether such a change has occurred? If it is a question of persuading the hearer to buy Snowy, then the speaker can say s/he has successfully persuaded her to buy it when the hearer actually buys it. This is true even for mass advertising today, where the audience is not a group of individuals who have been subject to techniques of persuasion, but a mass of faceless people. Advertisers surely know whether their persuasion has been successful by increased sales of the product they have been advertising. If people have not been successfully persuaded to buy the product, then the sales figures will show it. But such an approach does not relate to the acceptability of examples (11)-(13), in which no action is required on the hearer's part save a change in mental state. This change may be overtly expressed as when the individual hearer in the washing powder example says: (14) You have convinced me. I will buy a packet. We would certainly accept it as a possible response to the attempt to persuade the hearer to hold the opinion that Snowy is the best on the market, but the minimal response to indicate a successful act of persuasion is in fact a mental act which indicates a change of attitude. In social psychology research, this change of attitude is all that is required in order for a successful act of persuasion to have taken place (Hogg and Vaughan, 1995). The change may be a result of carefully worked out arguments, which is the socalled 'central route' (Petty and Cacioppo, 1981). On the other hand, the change may take place through 'peripheral routes' as a result of secondary issues such as the credibility of the speaker (ibid.); Sbis~ points out that if a speaker wants to achieve his/her perlocutionary aim, then the hearer has to believe in the trustworthiness of the speaker (Sbis~, 1983: 309). Another peripheral route is the exploitation of mental shortcuts such as the use of truisms (heuristic processing; cf. Chaiken et al., 1989). In psychological research the change in attitude may be ascertained by means of questionnaires, interviews or laboratory testing such as motor response. This may seem to imply that some external response is necessary; after all, we cannot read what is going on in the hearer's mind. The hearer may be performing mental acts, but without divine powers (or unless we are an omniscient author in the literary context), there is no way for us to discover what these acts are. After hearing an argument, for example, a person would make "it plain that [s/he] regards [her~him]self as committed positively or negatively, to that expressed opinion" (van Eemeren and Grootendorst, 1984: 69; authors' emphasis; but see section 3, below, for a weaker version of argumentation). Let us go back to our Snowy washing powder example. Let us assume that the speaker has used all the tricks in the book to convince the hearer that Snowy is the best. When can the speaker say that s/he has convinced the hearer? On the surface, it would seem from the above argument that that would happen when s/he receives

580

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

some appropriate response; or it may be non-verbal but communicative, a nod of the head for example; or it may of course be expressed in the form of a verbal response such as the simple: (15) Yes, you have convinced me. It may even be expressed in the form of a physical act, for example, the hearer goes out immediately and buys the washing powder. However, the speaker, without receiving any overt response from the hearer, may still say: (16) I've convinced her. The speaker may in such cases rely on some sort of intuition, and perhaps express it thus: (17) I think I've convinced her that Snowy is the best. which leaves the speaker the possibility of opting out (18a) or (18b): (18a) I think but I am not sure. (18b) I think I persuaded her but I may be wrong. Hence, the effect of an act of persuasion, whether it is successful or not, may be assumed by the speaker, and there is no need for any active participation on the part of the hearer.

3. Incitement: lllocutionary or perlocutionary act ? Let us now look at incitement. The initial problem to be considered is whether incitement is an illocutionary or a perlocutionary act. In his discussion of the success condition of the perlocutionary verbs prevail upon and incite in contrast to verbs such as ask where the hearer decides to carry out the act that the speaker intends, Leech (1983: 202) says that these verbs "incorporate that success condition as part of their meaning". While (19) Joe incited Bill to rob the bank. entails that Bill "adopted Joe's goal of robbing the bank" (ibid.: 203), i.e. Joe's original perlocutionary goal leads to the desired perlocutionary effect on Bill, (19') Joe asked Bill to rob the bank. means "only that if Bill [was] subsequently determined to rob the bank, then Joe's request was successful" (ibid.: 203). Among linguists and pragmatists who have

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

581

related to perlocutionary acts, Leech seems to be the only one who has discussed incitement as such an act, but he makes the important point that what he refers to is the perlocutionary goal (what has also been termed in this paper the desired perlocutionary effect), and it is this, and not the actual perlocutionary effect, that may be regarded as part of speech act theory. The first question we ask concerning Leech's example and similar examples is whether the entailment he proposes does in fact hold. Let us examine a series of utterances with incite as the verb in the same way as we treated p e r s u a d e (or c o n vince), and see whether we can reach some conclusion concerning its speech act status. Let us assume for argument's sake that example (19) is a perlocutionary act in which the perlocutionary goal and the perlocutionary effect are the same - its success depends on Bill's robbing the bank. The question then arises whether the following utterance is acceptable: (20) Joe incited Bill to rob the bank, but Bill could not get the right tools, so he gave up his plan. If the utterance is acceptable, and I think it is, then the hearer's successful performance of the desired act is not a necessary condition, i.e. the actual peflocutionary effect is not of importance here, only the desired perlocutionary effect (or perlocutionary goal). At this juncture, what seems to be implied as a minimum condition is Bill's change of attitude; this is similar to the attitude change in a successful persuasion, with the major difference that the desired act in a persuasion is not normally a criminal act, while in incitement the act is almost invariably so (see below). Bill, however, could not say, after the successful incitement, if this implies at least a mental act on his part (cf. (15) above): (21) You have incited me. I will rob the bank. at least not in m o d e m colloquial English, and probably neither in other languages. 4 It may be possible where incite has the meaning of 'urge', which is no longer in current usage, but that is not of concern h e r e ) Even when Bill leaves the room after the act of incitement without indicating explicitly that he will rob the bank, Joe would probably not say (21a) or (21b) to another person:

4 In keeping with our looking basically at speech acts, and not at speech act verbs. In Hebrew, for example, one cannot say *hesatta oti - ani eSdod et ha-bank (translation of (21)), but an utterance such as hesatta oti liSdod et ha-bank ('you incited me to rob the bank') is possible without stating whether the desired perlocutionary effect took place or not. The speaker in this case is either sincerely pleading innocence or playing innocent. 5 The verb incite does occur in the Oxford English Dictionary with non-legal meanings similar to 'urge', but it should be noted that the last entry in the most recent edition of the dictionary is from a text published in 1880: "A certainty, and an overflowing gladness in the heart, which are capable of inciting heroic deeds". The Webster's Third International Dictionary gives 'urge on' as the fourth meaning of the verb incite. To illustrate this definition, it cites a sentence by T.L. Peacock, an English novelist and poet who died in 1866, again not a modern English example.

582

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

(21a) I think I have incited Bill to rob the bank. (21b) I think I have incited Bill but I may be wrong. The reason for this does not seem to be syntactic as such, but one explanation may involve a question of register: people who incite other people to commit a crime do not, when speaking, relate to criminal concepts. Another explanation may be that the use of incite presupposes that the speaker is advocating a crime. To say 'I incite' would be self-incriminating, an act that criminals try to avoid doing. 6 Joe may say instead (22a) or (22b): (22a) I think I've got him. (22b) I think he'll do it. but certainly not an utterance with the verb incite. This may mean either that incite is a perlocutionary verb, but it is not used in the same way as persuade, for example, because of register or quasi-legal constraints, or that incite or, more precisely, the act of incitement is not a perlocutionary act, but only an illocutionary act. But even here we may have difficulties. Speech acts with predictable perlocutionary effects are not conventional, as already noted by Austin (1976: 117). One may wake someone up by shouting in her/his ear: 'Don't wake up', whose semantics provides the contrary meaning. Perlocutionary acts, furthermore, may be performed without speech. It is possible to persuade by facial expressions and head movement; for example, to persuade someone to accompany you is possible by your lifting your eyebrows and tilting your head in the appropriate distal direction. Intimidation can be performed by threatening with a weapon. To alarm someone may be carded out by some loud noise such as that of a bell. It has often been pointed out that an insult cannot be performed by saying 'I insult you'; hence it may be a performative which does not have the normal performative structure. But is an insult a perlocutionary act? It is not a necessary condition for a successful insult that the hearer or the receiver of the insult even acquires the desired mental state of being insulted. Whatever the desired perlocutionary effect may be, it does not have to have any consequence, not even a mental act. What is important is the speaker's goal, not the subsequent effect on the hearer. This may be illustrated by the dialogue in the opening scene of Shakespeare's R o m e o and Juliet, in which Sampson and Gregory, of the Capulet household (Juliet's family), meet up in a public place in Verona with two Montague (Romeo's family) retainers Abraham and Balthasar: (23) Gregory: I will frown as I pass by, and let them take it as they list. Sampson: Nay, as they dare. I will bite my thumb at them; which is a disgrace to them, if they bear it. [Sampson bites his thumb.]

6 My thanks to an anonymousreviewer for pointing out this possibility.

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

Abraham: Samuel: Abraham: Samuel: Gregory: Samuel: Gregory: Abraham: Samuel:

583

Do you bite your thumb at us, sir? I do bite my thumb, sir. Do you bite your thumb at us, sir? [aside to Gregory] Is the law of our side if I say ay? [aside to Sampson] No. No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir; but I bite my thumb, sir. Do you quarrel, sir? Quarrel, sir! no, sir. If you do, sir, I am for you ... (1.1.45-60)

The argument here is over the interpretation of Sampson's thumb biting, which in Elizabethan times was considered an insult, although such a gesture could be ambiguous, since what may appear as thumb-biting could be an innocent method of removing food from between the teeth or even sucking a small wound on the thumb. Abraham wants to know what Sampson's intention was in biting his thumb. Sampson does not give the reason for biting his thumb; he simply states that he was biting it. Abraham's question relates to thumb-biting at Balthasar and him, not simply thumbbiting. If the thumb-biter bites his thumb at a person, that is regarded as an insult. Here, we have negotiations over whether an insult occurred, and the answer is not in the effect of Sampson's thumb-biting, but in his intention behind the biting, i.e. his perlocutionary goal. To avoid trouble (which however takes place immediately afterwards with the appearance of Benvolio and Tybalt), Sampson does not in fact insult Abraham. So, the source of the perlocutionary act, if 'insult' is such an act, is again with the speaker. The speaker does something, or says something, with the intention of causing a particular effect. It is the desired effect that may be termed the perlocutionary effect, but does the speaker perform a perlocutionary act if the effect does not occur? Since a speaker tends to have a goal in uttering something, the answer to this question is that it seems that s/he does. But if so, then why speak of perlocutionary acts at all? Whether the act has the desired effect or not, what the speaker does is perform an illocutionary act only. Verbal insults seem to be phrases and expressions that have the potential of hurting people's feelings, but the net result may not be such a reaction. Among children, attempts to insult may be answered by: (24) Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. which seems to suggest that insults are interpreted as such through the particular illocutionary acts and the assumed perlocutionary intention, and do not rely on success. This may again suggest that linguistically, we are again dealing with illocutionary acts only. The various perlocutionary effects that take place depend purely on external circumstances and not on the words. What Abraham asks about, in (23) above, is Sampson's intention behind the thumb-biting to see whether it may be interpreted as an insult. Sampson's verbal reply suggests one thing, but his previous conversation with Gregory suggests another. The original intention is unknown to the Montague servants.

584

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

Before we explore the possibility that we are dealing solely with illocutionary acts (one implication of which is that there is no such thing as perlocutionary acts in speech act theory), let us examine other possible utterances in which incitement is a means by which the hearer will hold criminal intentions, but not necessarily commit a criminal act immediately; for example, let us take a look at the following pair: (25a) Joe incited Bill that the bank was easy to rob. (25b) Joe incited Bill to think of all bank managers as potential targets. I think the first utterance is not acceptable. It is surely not part of the meaning of the verb incite that one can attribute to the hearer statements that have been uttered, although such utterances may be considered part of the act of incitement (and it is the latter that we are primarily interested in). Unlike persuade and other unproblematic (?) perlocutionary verbs, there does not seem to be a mutual relationship between the verb incite and the action. What may be regarded as incitement may not be referred to by the verb incite, certainly not during the process of incitement, and not afterwards by the people involved - the criminals themselves and the police or courts. The latter groups will talk of incitement and of the accusation that Joe incited Bill to rob the bank, not that the bank is easy to rob. The second utterance is also problematic, but not as much as the first one. Whatever Joe may have said about bank managers, it could be interpreted as incitement, but whether we can then say 'Joe incited Bill to think ...' is not so clear. But in both instances, we may say (26a) as well as (26b): (26a) Joe convinced Bill that the bank was easy to rob. (26b) Joe convinced Bill that all bank managers are potential targets. Bill's possible answers, if forthcoming, would then be utterances such as: (27) Yes, you have convinced me that the bank is easy to rob. and the consequence might then be: (28) You have convinced me. I will rob the bank. These responses may be compared with example (21), which is unacceptable. So, given the appropriate context, we can say at the moment that Joe has incited Bill. Incitement is therefore not equivalent to persuasion, and this is due not only to the fact that in the case of incitement, the act incited is normally criminal, while this is not so in persuasion. The act of persuasion or conviction need not point to future acts but only to a possible change in mental state, while the act of incitement does necessarily refer to a future act, even if that future act is only potential. What this seems to imply is that incitement is not an act analogous to persuasion, which may then further imply that incitement is not a perlocutionary act. If we return to our original incitement utterance (cf. (19), repeated here):

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

585

(19) Joe incited Bill to rob the bank. it does not in fact entail that Bill adopted Joe's perlocutionary goal of robbing the bank. We are dealing with an illocutionary act only. This conclusion conforms to the legal position, and that position is fairly crucial to the discussion, since as we have seen, the use of the verb incite or of the noun incitement is on the whole register-restricted. Inciters themselves would not use the words, at least not in the type of utterances given above. The act of incitement is in most instances an institutionally defined act. If that is the case, our next question concerns the distinction between incitement and other illocutionary acts. Not only are perlocutionary acts not conventional (as mentioned above), the same is true for most illocutionary acts. Performatives of the form: (29) I promise I will be there at three. or

(30) I state that the bank is easy to rob. are not prototypical of illocutionary acts (the performative analysis is an interesting historical episode in generative semantics). We either use declarative sentences to make statements, interrogative sentences to ask questions or to make requests, etc. or use indirect speech acts (Searle, 1975). To make a statement we do not preface it by 'I state (that) ...'; we simply utter the statement 'the bank is easy to rob'. When we make a promise, we do not have to say 'I promise (that) ...' but simply the declarative 'I'11 be there at three', which may be interpreted in the appropriate context as a promise. The use of the performative verb in such contexts is restricted to emphatic utterances, to institutional contexts, and to student introductions to speech act theory. But there is no illocutionary verb incite that enables us to say (31a), or even (31b): (31a) *I incite you that the bank is easy to rob. (31b) *I incite you to rob the bank. So in order to incite, the speaker in fact does not incite! That may sound paradoxical, but such is the case. Just as promises and requests are usually indirect in that the hearer has to draw inferences to understand the speaker's meaning, incitement entails using a number of illocutionary acts - making statements, promises, and requests, but not one act which may be glossed as 'to incite'. But the same syntactic situation is found among other illocutionary acts, for example some of Bach and Hamish's descriptives and retroactives, among others (1979: 42-43), cannot occur in the form 'first person + present simple + that', cf. e.g.: (32) *I classify that ... *I rank that ...

586

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

*I correct that ... *I disown that ... But this is also true for the paradigmatic perlocutionary act of persuasion, although partly for different reasons. There is no conventional form 'I persuade you to ...', that is, if the success of the persuasion depends on the hearer's appropriate response, then the speaker cannot sincerely say 'I persuade you ...'. Moreover, the act of (verbal, I have to add) persuasion is actually a complex speech act or a set of individual speech acts that may eventually accumulate into an act of persuasion. More precisely, provisionally taking persuasion as an integral component of argumentation, "[A]rgumentation is a speech act consisting of a constellation of statements designed to justify or refute an expressed opinion and calculated in a regimented discussion to convince a rational judge of a particular standpoint of the acceptability or unacceptability of that expressed opinion." (van Eemeren and Grootendorst, 1984: 18) This close relationship between argumentation and the perlocutionary effect of persuasion has, however, been criticized. The essential condition of the speech act complex of argumentation, posited by van Eemeren and Grootendorst, may not necessarily be persuasion, i.e. the constellation of statements making up the argument may not count as an attempt by the speaker to justify the opinion to the hearer's satisfaction, that is, to convince the hearer to accept the opinion. All that may be required for a successful performance of argumentation is placing the hearer under an obligation to take certain arguments into account, when considering the opinion, as reasons in favour of the opinion (Sbis~ (1988), as response to van den H o v e n ' s (1988) discussion on legal argumentation). The case of incitement is similar to that of persuasion in the following way: there need not be one particular utterance that constitutes the act of incitement, although it is possible. The form of the utterance or utterances may be one or more speech act type; statements can be made, and so can requests and promises, etc. In a leading South African case (S. v. Nkosiyana, in 1966), the judge in his opinion spells out many of the possibilities: "an inciter is one who reaches and seeks to influence the mind of another to the commission of a crime. The machinations of criminal ingenuity being legion, the approach to the other's mind may take various forms, such as suggestion, proposal, request, exhortation, gesture, argument, persuasion, inducement, goading, or the arousal of cupidity." (p. 658; my emphasis) The overall effect of a series of speech acts is incitement. Any statement, or series of statements, too, may be regarded as an act of incitement, even if the hearer does not act in accordance with it. In fact, we may try to set up the success conditions of incitement, be it one speech act or a series of speech acts whose accumulative effect produces the illocutionary act of incitement. It should be noted that if the act of incitement is accomplished by one speech act only, then we are probably dealing with an indirect speech act: the secondary illocutionary act, to use Searle (1975)'s

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

587

terms, may be making a statement, while the primary act is to incite. Here is a possible set of conditions following Searle's pattern: Propositional content condition: S predicates a future criminal act of H. Preparatory conditions: (a) H would not do the specific criminal act in the normal course of affairs, and (b) H is able to do the act. Sincerity condition: S wants H to do the act. Essential condition: counts as an incitement. This last condition seems to suggest that in discussing incitement as an iUocutionary act, it is enough to relate solely to what the speaker has said, and the hearer is not a necessary partner, which seems to correspond to what is developing in this discussion. But it should not be forgotten that a potential audience has to be considered, even though that audience does not react. This is especially true when we consider, as mentioned above, that any statement may in the appropriate circumstances be an act of incitement. The utterer may deny such a goal, but the utterance may be interpreted by some audience as incitement (see section 4 below on incitement and expression of opinion). Incitement in legal terms is advocating illegal or criminal action; as stated in the propositional content condition, it is the expression of opinions, of statements whose content refers to a future criminal act, or more precisely to a criminal act in the immediate future ('imminent lawless action' in the U.S. Supreme Court's words, see section 4 below), and it is not a necessary condition for any hearer to act according to it. The propositional content when it comes to speech acts has constantly been undervalued; when should the future act of the speaker occur in cases of promising, for example (see, e.g., Kurzon, 1993: 287-288)? In the case of incitement, a similar question may be asked: what may be considered to be a reference to a future criminal act? If we consider the potential incitement discussed above: (30') The bank is easy to rob. we may ask whether the propositional content condition of incitement suggested above is being fulfilled. It is true that robbing a bank is a criminal act (even if the robber is a Robin Hood!), but does the utterance above (30') refer to the potential criminal act of robbing the bank? On the surface, the answer has to be 'no'. What is being said here is a statement of fact or of opinion. After all, it may be said in a context in which security officers are examining branch offices of a bank, and they note that this particular branch is easy to rob, so the security set-up has to be improved. But if Joe utters it to Bill, and both are in the bank-robbing profession, then the circumstances have changed. They are no longer talking about the need to improve the security. They have no intention of enhancing the security. In fact, they are going to take advantage of the lack of security, and rob the bank. Hence, any utterance may constitute an act of incitement if the circumstances are appropriate to allow for such an interpretation.

588

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

But the interpretation of (30') as an act of incitement is not part of the semantics of the utterance. The secondary illocutionary act of giving an opinion about the inadequate security gives way to the primary act of inciting (thereby treating incitement as an indirect speech act). Here, we could examine the inferences needed to be drawn to reach such a conclusion. A Gricean approach is not the focus of the present discussion, so I leave it to the readers to suggest the chain of inferences needed to interpret the utterance in the obvious way, given the characters Joe and Bill. It is only as an indirect speech act that we may talk of some future criminal act; that is what is implied, and that is what is refutable. Joe can claim in his defence that all he did was to state an opinion about the poor security system of the bank. There is no hint that he was trying to incite Bill to rob it. He could claim that what he said is similar to 'what a nice day it is today', which would normally not be read as incitement (unless it were inciting, for example, the gods to cause rain to fall!). Much of the problem concerning incitement, given the frequently indirect speech acts that are uttered in its performance, is the circumstances. In the above example, I have provided some of the background material necessary to interpret Joe's utterance as incitement. But Joe may claim that he is reformed and he would not think of committing another crime, and would not dream of another stretch in prison. Joe is innocent until proven guilty. Therefore, we would also have to look for the appropriate circumstances outside the characters of the speaker and hearer themselves. But setting up generalizations concerning appropriate circumstances or conditions is not an easy task. In light of the arguments over the speech act status of persuasion, discussed above, and of incitement, which is not what it seems to be (i.e. an illocutionary or perlocutionary act, or even there is no such thing as a perlocutionary act), it is not surprising that arguments and disagreements will arise. So, let us reiterate, the general conclusion is that any statement may constitute incitement given the appropriate situation.

4. Incitement in legal discourse Let us now take a closer look at the legal problem, for it seems that incitement may be defined primarily within a legal context. The lawyer, or the court, will ask whether a given statement is an innocent expression of opinion or whether it is an attempt to get a hearer, or even a potential hearer, to commit a crime. The focus of the legal discussion is on the nature of the illocutionary act alone, but it should be remembered that different criminal codes and procedures may treat the subject differently. Let us begin with the clearest treatment of the problematic borderline between incitement and expression of opinion - the American case. The First Amendment to the American Constitution reads: "Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." (my emphasis)

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

589

The italicized phrase is the crux of the legal matter. If a person makes a remark against the government, and advocates force to overthrow it, the question arises whether the expression of this person's opinion is protected by the Constitution, or whether it is incitement. The Supreme Court, in the course of this century, has used a number of formulae to test the distinction. There should be a distinction, says Redish (1984: 188), between statements that seem to urge another person to commit a crime, and statements which do not seem to advocate any illegal act, although they may eventually lead the other person to commit a crime (see below). The principal tests that have been used have been 'clear and present danger' (Justice Holmes some eighty years ago) and 'imminent lawless action' ( B r a n d e n b u r g v. O h i o , one of the more recent precedents, decided in 1969). To differentiate between a genuine expression of opinion, on the one hand, and incitement on the other, it is necessary to examine whether what is being expressed is the mere advocacy of theoretical political opinions, in which case the speech acts are protected under the Constitution, or whether these are calls for immediate violent action, in which case the courts may legally intervene. In discussions of incitement among British jurists we find a different but also fairly clear picture. In British law, incitement is not explicitly associated with free speech. Incitement is regarded as an inchoate crime, that is a crime that occurs before a potential physical crime. Its criminal nature is the existence of what is called m e n s rea, 'the guilty mind', which is traditionally seen as one side of a planned crime, the other side being the act itself (the a c t u s r e u s ) . 7 We also find that the British position seems to support the contention that incitement is an illocutionary and not a perlocutionary act. This stems from legal discussion in which jurists have found it necessary to distinguish between inciting a person to commit a crime and being an accessory in crime. It is a crime to incite another to commit a crime, but once the incited crime is committed, then the inciter of the incited crime is an accessory before the fact, if not an accomplice or a party to a conspiracy. Glanville Williams, in his classic textbook on C r i m i n a l L a w , wrote: "in incitement the crime has not (or has not necessarily) been committed, whereas a party cannot be accessory in crime unless the crime has been committed". (Williams, 1961: 612) Furthermore, allowing for incitement to a general public as in a newspaper article without knowing who the incited person is, "it is immaterial that the words had no effect on the person solicited; but they must have reached his mind". (ibid.)

7 These days with many administrative offences, especially motoring offences, it is very difficult to consider mens rea as part of the offence.When caught for speeding, the driver cannot claim that s/he did not mean to go over the speed limit, therefore s/he did not have the required mental attitude, and therefore s/he is innocent. Offending motorists do not normally pass a stop sign without stopping, or go over a red light intentionally. Nevertheless, they have committed an offence, which is an actus reus without the accompanyingmens rea.

590

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

There must be a hearer, even if s/he can be defined vaguely as the general public or as a random section of the public (see below on the distinction between public and private acts of communication). This is true for many if not most speech acts (except for genuine monologues), but the hearer, as we have seen, need not react in the desired way, i.e. the desired perlocutionary effect need not materialize. But we still have a case of incitement. Henry II's fury against the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, is a case in point of possible misunderstanding of the speaker's intention. It may be argued that Henry wanted Becket to be persuaded to change his behaviour, or to be arrested. In fact, an official mission was sent to Becket to restrain him. But the four knights thought otherwise. There are two versions of what Henry was supposed to have said. The popular form (often found in dictionaries of quotations): (33) Who will rid me of this turbulent priest? may be a direct request on the part of the king for anyone in his hearing to rid him of Becket, i.e. kill him. However, the more accurate translation of Henry's words (said originally in Norman French): (34) What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and promoted in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a lowborn clerk? may have had the same effect, but its semantics suggests a question about the type of advice the king has received from his counsellors ('miserable drones and traitors') conceming the Archbishop. As far as Henry was concemed, his question was an expression of rage, and at the time it was Henry's side of the story that was believed. The four knights, however, interpreted it as incitement to carry out what they interpreted as the king's bidding - to murder the Archbishop. In a leading British case Race Relations Board v. Applin and another ([1973] 1QB, 815-832), the defendants were convicted of inciting a couple who fostered children for short periods of time not to accept coloured children. One such incitement text reads: (35) In answer to your question asking me if I am urging you to tell the local authorities that you will only except [sic] white children. Yes I am. (p. 625) It was held that the act that Mr. and Mrs. Watkin, the couple, were incited to commit was illegal, so the content of the incitement must predicate explicitly (as in this case) or implicitly (in most other cases) a future criminal act. Furthermore, and more to the point in the present context, the couple refused to succumb to the threats, but the defendants were still guilty of incitement. If the couple had agreed, they would also have been guilty of an offence under the 1968 Race Relations Act, and the defendants would not have been convicted of incitement but of conspiracy or some other more serious inchoate crime.

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

591

The point made in the Applin case that the act incited has to be an illegal or criminal act appears in full force in the Whitehouse case (1977 QB 868), in which a man was charged with inciting his fifteen-year-old daughter to commit incest with him. Since, however, fifteen-year-old girls cannot according to the law commit crimes, the man could not be prosecuted for inciting an act that is not a criminal act. In discussing the case, Smith (1981) says: "incitement of a person to do an act which, when done, is not a crime, cannot be incitement to commit a crime". (Smith, 1981: 30) Since incitement is a legally defined term in the main (its everyday use is very loose), we should also look for aid among jurists who have been concerned with crime and speech. Among American scholars, who (it should be recalled) view the entire question against the back-cloth of the First Amendment (freedom of speech), Greenawalt (1989) distinguishes public and private communication: "A principle of free speech usually has more to do with public communication encouraging specific crimes ... When communication is public, the audience is larger, and, because others are aware of what is said, ample opportunity exists for counterarguments and for precautionary official measures if a serious crime is feared." (Greenawalt, 1989:116) In contrast is the private act of communication between one individual and a small audience: "A person with selfish aims may in private and with a selected audience be particularly able to manipulate the ideological predilections of his audience." (Greenawalt, 1989:117) Even here, Greenawalt has seen it necessary to add a brief psychological profile concerning the inciter ( ' a person with selfish aims'). It seems that, when one is looking for the set of circumstances in which statements may be considered incitement, the most obvious factors to be taken into account are the participants themselves, as we have already seen (section 3 above). Redish (1984) argues for a more linguistically based distinction to be made between statements that seem to urge a hearer to commit a crime, and statements that do not, on the surface, advocate crimes but may eventually lead another person to commit a crime. He compares (36) and (37): (36) Let's overthrow the government. (37) You should kill that cop. which are interpreted as direct incitement to crime because of the explicit structures 'overthrow + the government' and 'kill + that cop', with (36') and (37'): (36") This government suppresses minorities, (37') That cop harassed me yesterday. which may be read as statements of opinions (Redish, 1984: 188).

592

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

But even here, in the appropriate circumstances, statements that do not explicitly spell out an illegal act may be interpreted as incitement. It has been suggested several times in the present discussion that any utterance, given a suitable context, may be interpreted as incitement. Redish (ibid.) suggests as an example of clear incitement: (38) The man in that jail tortured and killed my mother. uttered outside a jail in front of an unruly mob; in other circumstances it may be regarded as a statement of fact or as an accusation. A genuine example of alleged incitement comes from a lynching case in Florida in 1934, when the local newspaper published the coroner's jury: (39) Lola Cannidy, in the peace of God, then and there being feloniously and willfully, with malice aforethought [raped] and that the said Claude Neal with a certain blunt instrument which he then and there held in and upon said Lola Cannidy, did inflict a mortal wound. [...] That the said Claude Neal, in the manner aforesaid, did then and there kill and murder, and said jurors do further say upon their oath aforesaid, that Annie Smith and Sallie Smith were feloniously present at the time of the felony and murder aforesaid in manner committed [...] comforting, aiding and abetting the said Claude Neal to do so and commit the said felony and murder. (In Marianna Daily Times-Courier, p. 1., October 23, 1934) In his book on the lynching of Neal, Govern (1982: 51) argues that this report was "an incitement to violence against Neal". On the surface, all we have here is an accurate report of a jury's decision concerning a particular murder. What makes such a text perfectly normal in certain contexts, and incitement in others? Given the state of affairs in the deep South at the time, where anti-black feelings among whites ran high just on account of skin colour, white lower middle and working class males were in fear of their livelihood because of the general economic conditions following the Wall Street crash; the ideal scapegoat was the black man who was seen as a constant threat to the white population. The white men saw lynching as a deterrent, especially as a means of protecting the women. We can go further into setting up the appropriate circumstances in this case, but it is these details that distinguish an innocent text from incitement. Another case is the leading American case of Brandenburg v. Ohio, in which Brandenburg, a member of the Ohio branch of the Ku Klux Klan, was charged and convicted of incitement after allowing a film to be distributed that shows him dressed in Ku Klux Klan costume and saying things like: (40) Bury the niggers. Send the Jews back to Israel. The Supreme Court, in allowing his appeal, did not see in these and similar statements incitement to persons to immediately commit crimes. These statements are

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

593

"mere advocacy" and not incitement "to imminent lawless action" (p. 447). Justice Douglas, in his concurring judgment, wrote: "The line between what is permissible and not subject to control and what may be made impermissible and subject to regulation is the line between ideas and overt acts." What Brandenburg did was express his ideas, not incite overt criminal acts. Events in Israel following Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in November 1995 also focused in part on possible incitement by mainly extra-parliamentary opposition fringe groups, which seemed to have advocated the violent overthrow of the government. Although before the assassination, attention was drawn from time to time to what may be termed words of incitement, it was only after Rabin's death that such texts were taken more seriously in retrospect. But again, before any decision is made to prosecute, all the circumstances have to be taken into account to examine whether these texts constitute incitement or not (to date, no one has been prosecuted for incitement to murder; two have been given long prison sentences for conspiracy in connection with the assassination, and the assassin himself has been given a life sentence). Let us look at a pair of such statements, and see whether they may be regarded as incitement. The leader of one extremist right-wing group was reported as saying (and this was some time before the assassination): (41) I have fears, but Yossi Sarid [leading left-wing minister in Rabin's government] and Rabin who are at the helm are leading the state to civil war. If they are not careful, they could be killed. Another example is the following banner seen outside Rabin's house in Tel Aviv the week before the assassination: (42) Wait, wait! Another year and your [plural] end will be like the end of Benito Mussolini and his mistress. In both these cases, there is no direct incitement to murder or commit any other crime. The speaker of the first statement is expressing his fears that if things do not change, two of the country's political leaders may be killed. What is behind this statement is that if their policy is changed, then the day of judgment is warded off, and further, it serves as a piece of advice to change the policy in order to survive. The speaker does not advocate any crime, but only claims that s/he senses that that is what may happen. The second example, (42), however, may be seen as a direct threat to Yitzhak Rabin and his wife (note that 'your' in the plural - s o f x e m 'end-your[pl]' - refers to the couple living in the house). With the knowledge that Mussolini and his mistress were killed by partisans in April 1945, and their bodies were hanged upside down in a Milan piazza, there can be no doubt that the banner threatened the Rabin couple with the same end. However, the phrase 'another year' does not seem to imply - if

594

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

we take American law as the deciding factor (which it isn't) - 'imminent lawless action' as stated in the Brandenburg case. Hence, no action was taken before, although after the assassination the law-enforcing authorities regretted not having taken decisive action in time; all such action against possible inciters after the assassination may be seen as closing the barn door after the horse has bolted. But there are objective reasons for not taking action against demonstrators and writers of what could be called incitement. Unlike the case of the man speaking to a mob outside a jail in which a person is detained accused of killing his mother (Redish, 1984: 188), which may be seen as incitement to lynch the suspect, where the behavioural norm in the particular society or community is to leave justice and punishment to the appropriate authorities (courts, police), and not to take the law into one's own hands (as it is generally in the United States, in Europe, and in Israel), then predictions and statements of the kind illustrated above cannot be seen as cases of inciting persons to assassinate the Prime Minister. This stand is further supported by Greenawalt's (1989) distinction between public and private communication, discussed above, in which public communication directly or indirectly advocating criminal acts can be counterargued in public, thus possibly taking the sting out of the threat.

5. Are there perlocutionary acts? We have two basic conclusions to the present discussion, the first specific to incitement, and the second relating to perlocutionary acts in general. Incitement in both the everyday sense and in the legal sense is an illocutionary act, contrary to what our (linguistic) intuition may tell us. In English it does seem somewhat strange to say: (43) Joe incited Bill to rob the bank, but Bill didn't. In other languages, such an utterance is possible. In fact, in Hebrew for example, one can say 'he incites' (hu masit) without mentioning the hearer (see note 2). So, after a detailed analysis of the speech act of incitement, we reach the conclusion that the speech act must have some direct or indirect reference to a future illegal act potentially performable by the hearer or by unidentified hearers, and not necessarily the appropriate action by the hearer. Of more substance, perhaps, is the conclusion concerning perlocutionary acts. The conclusion comes as an answer to the question whether such acts are part of speech act theory. It seems that the hearer's response may not be necessary to ensure a successful iUocutionary act with certain desired perlocutionary effects. Certainly, perlocutionary effects may be negotiated as part of verbal interaction, but that awards full agency to the hearer, who does not act as a tool in the hands of the speaker. Studies of human interaction, within sociolinguistics and conversational analysis, make use - and indispensable use - of pragmatic tools such as speech act theory, the Gricean cooperative principle and its associated politeness phenomena. Speech act

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

595

theory is concerned with the illocutionary act and the assumptions made by the speaker, including assumptions concerning the hearer. Other pragmatic approaches, e.g. the Gricean cooperative principle, may deal with the part played by the hearer, including the drawing of inferences, which enables the hearer to interpret the speaker's meaning. From the arguments I have presented above, there may be two sets of consequences: (1) you either have been convinced of the argument and have accepted my position, or have not; and (2) what you may be convinced of is that perlocutionary acts - acts that succeed in attaining the speaker's purpose, i.e. the desired perlocutionary effect, are interesting phenomena, but they are not part of speech act theory, and as such are not part of pragmatics. Leech wrote over a decade ago that "perlocutionary effects do not form part of the study of pragmatics, since pragmatic force has to do with goals rather than with results" (1983: 203). He seems to be right. In fact, we can go a step further. Since perlocutionary acts in the sense just given seem to be outside the domain of speech act theory, there may not be a need to retain the term 'perlocutionary'. If what is being considered is the effect of an utterance on the hearer, then we may say exactly that: 'the effect of the utterance on the hearer'. The term 'perlocutionary' is an invention that does not concern linguistic study. The use of the term allows one to retain Austin's symmetry://locutions are locutions that constitute acts done in saying something, while perlocutions are acts done by saying something. The retention of Austin's distinction is not justified just because of historical development in the philosophy of language and allied disciplines. A further change would be the means by which one would avoid the long phrase proposed above to refer to the effect of an utterance. In fact, we may return to Austin and use 'uptake', even though Austin tried to distinguish between 'uptake' and 'perlocutionary effect' (see Cohen, 1973: 496). But even at this point of my argument, in my rejection of the concept of the perlocutionary act as a separate issue in speech act theory, the reader may retort that I have not explained the pragmatics of the Snowy washing powder example (4), repeated here: (4) S persuaded H to buy Snowy washing powder. If there is no such thing as a perlocutionary act, how would this utterance be explained? What S utters (or performs) with the purpose of persuading H to buy the washing powder is an illocutionary act, or perhaps a series of illocutionary acts. The attainment of S's goal is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the success of the utterance as an act of persuasion. But how do we then refer to the entire episode of persuasion? We may adopt a term from sociolinguistics, and talk of a 'speech event', which may be seen either as outside pragmatics, if we take a narrow view of the discipline, which may seem to be the one taken in this paper, or within a broader socio-pragmatic approach. What remains, then, in any discussion of perlocutionary acts in speech act theory is the perlocutionary effect desired by the speaker in uttering an illocutionary act. But that may be seen as the speaker's illocutionary or communicative goal, the stuff that pragmatics is made of in any case.

596

D. Kurzon / Journal of Pragmatics 29 (1998) 571-596

References Austin, John, 1976 [1962]. How to do things with words. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bach, K. and R.M. Hamish, 1979. Linguistic communication and speech acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Chaiken, S., A. Liberman and A.H. Eagly, 1989. Heuristic and systematic information processing within and beyond the persuasion context. In: J.S. Uleman and J.A. Bargh, eds., Unintended thought: Limits of awareness, intention and control, 212-252. New York: Guilford. Cohen, Ted, 1973. Illocutions and perlocutions. Foundations of Language 9: 492-503. Davis, S., 1980. Perlocution. In: J. Searle, F. Kiefer and M. Bierwisch, eds., Speech act theory and pragmatics, 37-55. Dordrecht: Reidel. van Eemeren, Frans H. and Rob Grootendorst, 1984. Speech acts in argumentative discussions. Dordrecht: Foris. Govern, James R., 1982. Anatomy of a lynching: The killing of Clause Neal. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana University Press. Greenawalt, Kent, 1989. Speech, crime and the uses of language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gu, Yueguo, 1993. The impasse of perlocution. Journal of Pragmatics 20(5): 405-432. Hogg, Michael A. and Graham M. Vaughan, 1995. Social psychology: An introduction. Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall. van den Hoven, Paul J., 1988. Legal argumentation as an illocutionary act complex: A critical analysis. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law I(1): 29-45. Kurzon, Dennis, 1986. It is hereby performed: Explorations in legal speech acts, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Kurzon, Dennis, 1993. Entrapped by words: Semiotic studies of Thomas Hardy's novels. Semiotica 95(3/4): 261-323. Kurzon, Dennis, 1996. 'To speak or not to speak': The comprehensibility of the revised police caution. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 9(25): 3-16. Leech, Geoffrey N., 1983. Principles of pragmatics. London: Longman. Maley, Y., 1994. The language of the law. In: J. Gibbons, ed., Language and the law, 11-50. London: Longman. Petty, R.E. and J.T. Cacioppo, 1981. Attitudes and persuasion: Classic and contemporary approaches. Dubuque, IA: Brown. Redish, Martin H., 1984. Freedom of expression: A critical analysis. Charlottesville, VA: Michie. Sbis~t, Marina, 1983. Some remarks on belief, confidence and cooperation. In: H. Parret, ed., On believing: Epistemological and semiotic approaches, 302-315. Berlin: de Gruyter. Sbis~, Marina, 1988. Response to P.J. van den Hoven. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 1(1): 47-50. Searle, John, 1975. Indirect speech acts. In: Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan, eds., Syntax and semantics: Speech acts, 59-82. New York: Academic Press. Reprinted in: John Searle, 1979. Expression and meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Smith, J.C., 1981. Secondary participation and inchoate offences. In: Crime, proof and punishment: Essays in memory of Sir Rupert Cross, 21-44. London: Butterworths. Trosborg, Anna, 1995. Statutes and contracts: An analysis of legal speech acts in the English language of the law. Journal of Pragmatics 23: 31-53. Wierzbicka, Anna, 1987. English speech act verbs: A semantic dictionary. Sydney: Academic Press. Williams, Glanville, 1961. Criminal law. 2nd edition. London: Stevens.