austin’s speech act theory and the speech …（奥斯汀的言语行为理论和演讲u2026）.pdf

Austin’s Speech Act Theory and the Speech Situation Etsuko Oishi Esercizi Filosofici 1, 2006, pp. 1-14 ISSN 1970-0164 link: http://www.univ.trieste.it/~eserfilo/art106/oishi106.pdf AUSTIN ’S SPEECH ACT THEORY AND THE SPEECH SITUATION Etsuko Oishi The talk starts with a question, why do we discuss Austin now? While answer- ing the question, I will (I) present an interpretation of Austin’s speech act theory, (II) discuss speech act theory after Austin, and (III) extend Austin’s speech act theory by developing the concept of the speech situation. And in the following section, three aspects of the speech situation, that is, (I) conventionality, (II) actuality, and (II) intentionality, will be explained. Then a short conclusion fol- lows. 1. Why do we discuss Austin now? Half a century ago, John Austin gave a series of lectures, the William James Lectures at Harvard, which were published posthumously as a book entitled How to Do Things with Words . Austin presented a new picture of analysing meaning; meaning is described in a relation among linguistic conventions corre- lated with words/sentences, the situation where the speaker actually says some- thing to the hearer, and associated intentions of the speaker. The idea that meaning exists among these relations is depicted successfully by the concept of acts: in uttering a sentence, that is, in utilizing linguistic conventions, the speaker with an associated intention performs a linguistic act to the hearer. Austin’s analysis of meaning is unique in the sense that meaning is not ex- plained through some forms of reduction. In reductive theories of meaning, complexities of meaning expressed by a sentence are reduced by a single crite- rion to something else, and this is claimed to be th