Locutionary Act Essay

Speech acts is one of the fundamental elements of Pragmatics. Cohen (1996) considers a speech act as a functional unit in communication. Similarly, Yule (1996) defines that speech acts are the performed utterances that have labels such as compliment, invitation, promise, apology, request and complaint. Ellis (1994) points out that interactional acts and speech acts are achieved by the speakers when utterances are performed in context. The former term refers to the management process in exchanging turns such as opening and closing conversations and the latter is the efforts of language learners to perform specific actions such as apologies, requests and complaints. Also, Yule (1996) emphasizes that the circumstances the utterances in are called …show more content…
Austin and John Searle as leading philosophers of language. They both have works on speech acts. Austin (1962) categorizes speech acts in three groups: locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. A locutionary act is the first category that is based on the speech (producing a basic utterance), An illocutionary act is the second category that is based on the communicative force of the utterance and a perlocutionary act is the last category that is based on the subsequent effect as a consequence of the utterance. The most important of these three categories is illocutionary act because the term speech act is mostly associated with illocutionary force of the utterance (Yule, 1996). An utterance “It is hot in here” is provided to exemplify the categorization in Austin (1962). At first, the locutionary meaning; it is the literal meaning of the utterance, secondly, illocutionary meaning; it is the social meaning of the utterance. It could be an indirect request to open the window for someone, indirect refusal to close the window for someone’s being cold or a complaint about someone’s wrong behavior of closing the window and finally the perlocutionary meaning; it is the effect of the