Speech
Act theory (SAT) Wednesday, 5
September 2001 986 words
Thursday,
6 September 2001 1675
Monday,
10 September 2001 1892
Tuesday,
1993 2493
Notes:
When people couldn't reach each other on the phone, they logged on to instant messaging systems to "talk" without delay. "There's no question this is going to be the biggest day in Internet traffic in U.S. history," says Allen Weiner of Nielsen//NetRatings.
America Online got an immediate spike in instant messaging traffic
in AOL chat rooms, people sought news and contact.
"My dad is arabic," wrote one user in the "Friends — Lean on
Me" chat room. "The entire side of my dads family is arabic."
"I hope they are fine," responded one chatter.
But quickly, someone else piped in: "We dont trust peoople like you. We
dont speak your language."
In another typical exchange, one said, "LETS PRAY FOR
THOSE WHO WERE INVOLVED AND THERE FAMILIES." The next post? "All i
hope they kill "
Every
utterance in a chat room is significant, but not every utterance makes a
statement, nor does it make a promise nor does it always make sense to the
witness of the utterance.[i]
Questions
in this section:
1)
What conditions are
necessary for an intended speech act to succeed?
2)
Can sincerity be expressed in a chatroom
speech act?
3)
How are words presented
as setting up a condition?
4)
What is involved with a
chatroom speech act?
5)
How do words, symbols
(emoticons) and abbreviations denote intentions in chatrooms?
This
section will use Speech Act Theory to create a reading construct of a chatroom.
Speech Act Theory (SAT) which was developed from the work of linguistic
philosophers[ii] focuses on
Austin’s (1962) and Searle’s (1969, 1976) notion of the illocutionary force
within a speech act.
Speech
Act Theory follows Austin and Searle’s writings. In 1955 John L. Austin gave lectures at Harvard University
(William James Lectures) which were published in 1962 as How to Do Things
with Words and Speech Acts. Though Austin is said to the founder of
Speech Act Theory it is John R. Searle’s book, incorporating Austin’s work published in 1969 entitled An Essay in
the Philosophy of Language which has been the more influential in development
of a Speech Act Theory.
Austin
noted that not only were sentences used to report of statements but some
sentences must be treated as the performance of an act.
For
example:
Vanderveken
(1981 and 1983) with Searle (1985) furthered Austin’s Speech Act Theory with
the proposition that the three main components of sentence meaning are the
illocutionary forces, senses, and denotations. (Vanderveken p.195). Searle
deals with illocutionary acts in the context of philosophy of language (Crosby,
1990). His social action of speech acts
can be reduced to one of promising.
Promising as in intent is an act of sincerity. In a chatroom sincerity is the smallest equation of meaning
exchange.
Searle
is concerned with the act of promising and lists several factors which he
believes constitute the act of promising:
1.
intending to do the
thing promised
2.
intending that the
uttering of the words of promising place one under an obligation
3.
intending that the
promisee learn that the uttered words place the promisor under an obligation,
4.
intending that the promisee
recognize this last intention by understanding the meaning of the words of
promising.
(It
is easy to question where is the actual act of promising in this system of
intentions of Searles’)
In a
chatroom we take an utterance (group of words, emoticon, abbreviation) and
analyse it to understand the speaker’s intent to accomplish a particular
result. For there to be success in a chatroom dialogue the illocutionary acts
are determined by the meaning of not only the utterances (including emoticons,
and abbreviations and misspelt words) but also the relevant contextual
features. For example, to be successful
in the astrotalk chatroom it would be a hindrance to dialogue completeness if
one made an utterance thus: “crows downed port again”. How could people in an astrology chatroom,
and let us add that they were predominately from the States know what this
means? Did some crows knock over a
bottle of port and drink it? Of course
in Australia if people are into football would quickly translate that this was
about the two AFL football teams in South Australia. Then again what would this have to do with astrology? Conversley if we were talking in a South
Australia sports chatroom, it would be doubtful that we would be understood if
we said “umpires were off ‘cause of square the umpire’s ”.
If no one in the chatroom had any astrological knowledge there would be no
successful illocutionary force present to untangle the utterance and to put it
into a meaningful perspective.
Illocutionary force is the
asking of questions presenting an intention.
<dingo42> in turn 2 asks
nicole wahts your sign ??
There
is intention that with a properly understood question or intention there will
be a properly understood response. All
elementary sentences contain an illocutionary force maker (Vanderveken
p.197). Therefore, <dingo42> would fully expect Nicole to tell what sign he
or she is. If Nicole responded by
talking about the New York Yankees in the World Series then <dingo42>’s
intended response would not be fulfilled.
But then this is the problem with multiple personed chatroom
dialogue. It is not always clear whether the response or the next line of
‘speech’ is indeed concerned with the intended question. We only assume that
Nicole was answering <dingo42> and not a question presented earlier which
may have asked for a response in regards to the playing of the New York Yankees
in the World Series.
In
single person-to-person chatrooms, such as Instant Messenger and ICQ there can
be a dialogue of question and answers.
Turn-taking is easier to follow and more obvious in these settings. We can still track conversation and find
turn-taking in a multied-person chatroom, though it is easier when there is a
transcription process such as saving all the text of the chatroom talk.
11) <Nicole528>
im a Gemini
14) <Nicole528>
hehe
Now we have the facts <Nicole528> is a Gemini. Of course we have no way of knowing whether
this is true but the question has been answered. She or he did not say that they were Hungairan with a size 12
foot.
INDIRECT
SPEECH
First we need to understand the concept of indirect speech acts. Chatrooms thrive on indirect utterances primarly because of the milieu of a chatroom. When there are dozens of utterances quickly scrolling past on a computer screen the observer, if he or she has any hope of responding must be able to interpret what is being said. It is the action-character of linguistic phenomena that creates a response. There is movement in everything that is said. All thoughts have action or energy and utterance is the hardcopy of thoughts. The word made manifest. What is so different about chat room utterances is the hardcopy, the written utterance. When chat room dialogue can be saved we have a long lasting copy of what is said.
Many
chat rooms can not be copied or saved.
For example, several chat rooms I visited today (Thursday, 13 September
2001) would have been so ideal to have copied for later research. This is two days after the airline crashes
into the World Trade Building in NYC and the Pentagon and Pennsylvania crashes. Even when we consider that chat rooms tend
to be faceless and non-emotional, what I read was very emotional and very
communicative. But as the chat rooms in
Yahoo
Without
taking into account that there could be a huge mixture of cultures (see Seale’s
speech act formulations with its emphasis on the speaker’s psychological state
when he speaks of cross-cultural applications) at any moment in any chatroom
involving people from anywhere in the world which would not only challenge
one’s cultural codes of linguistics, but their time zone differences and even seasonal
differences.
For
example, in a chatroom at this moment it is winter with rain and cold and it is
noon here in Australia whereas in New York it is midnight, summer and a hot
balmy night and there not only could be a New Yorker, me here in Australia, a
teenager in India, an elderly person in Argatina, a Palestinian in the Gaza
Strip, and someone on board the QE2 on a Pacific cruise all in the same
chatroom. Furthermore, there could be
someone who is orbiting the Earth aboard a space station, and a mountain
climber at a base camp in the Hamiliayns. We could have several age groups,
relgions, cultures and both genders and everyone with a different world view
conversing. After all the initial “hi J”, “hello ;)” “anyone in here from Maine” and on and
on someone may create an utterance of “the jews are shooting at us”. What does this mean?
Using
indirect speech act we would assume that this is someone in Palestine and
Isreal is taking military action. But
it could mean a drive by shooting in the Bronx. Other people in the chatroom can ask questions or ignore the
utterance and say something about the weather, or say that the New York Yankees
had a good game last night.
Because
of the nature of a chatroom we usually understand indirect speech and what it
is regarding. The nature of the
chatroom often provides the coding mechanisim for the speech event. .
For example;
<dingo42> in turn 2 asks
nicole wahts your sign ??
This could elcit any number of responses. Are we discussing road signs? Graffiti tags? The sign of the end of an age?
Books on semiotics give us different definitions of the concept of signs
which often are more complementary than contradictory. (Eco 1984) C. S. Peirce says a sign is “something which
stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity” (C. Peirce.
2.228). Here we are using the concept
of ‘the sign’ which is a primary basis of reference in the study of semiotics
(throughout the history of Western thought, the idea of a semiotic theory was
always labelled as a doctrine of signs (Jakobson 1974; Rey 1973; Sebeok 1976;
Todorov 1977) to symboloize something entirely different. How does one know when they are at a pub and
someone asks what is their sign what is being asked? Yet we instintively answer, “I am a Leo with Mars conjunct Uranus
in my eighth house and I have an eclipse of Venus to Saturn”. The question is a
difficult one to deal with in most settings.
What sort of response will we get? Does this person hate Leos? Love Leos?
Hit Leos over the head with beer jugs? Is it a question asked out of
bordom? Or is it just an insignificant
question used to meet someone? A
typical pick-up line? I have done an
indepth study of astrology for more than thirty-five years so I am more
interested in one’s birth data than one who follows sun sign astrology in the
newspapers.
<Nicole528>
im a Gemini
<Nicole528> has answered directly and simply.
Linguistic
action
Intention
– can we read what the intention of a speaker is? Or do we superimpose what we
think is the speaker’s intentions? Furthermore, in a chatroom the emphasis is
the continuousness of the dialogue because one may never finish what they have
begun to say. The utterances have no
development. For example,
Chatroom
acts have necessary directness towards another person. Therefore, chatroom acts constitute a
miniature “civil society”. The people
in the room often establish rules of engagement or manners of civil dialogue.
There
are basically two manners in which to deal with one who is not acceptable to
the current conversation occurring. Either the person is ignored totally i.e.
no matter what they say no one responds (for example in astrol…) or several
voices group together in an attempt to either silence or force out the unwanted
voice. (for example in astrol…).
Chat
rooms are usually randomly assembled voices with people coming and going as
well as changing their user name, and in some instances one person can be
logged into as chatroom using several names creating a multi-personality in the
chatroom that others may believe are in fact different identities all together.
Therefore, the constantly changing make up of the chatroom society must be a
self-governing and self-rule creating environment.
Speech
Act in person-to-person would obviously have a different set of protocols than
a SA in a chatroom. In a group of a
dozen people the dominant voices may be the males, the older people, the
younger people, the Americans, the Leos or the Generals. Through the use of
change in voice such as pitch, tone and the use of physical posturing: IE. Some
people manage to manoeuvre themselves into the front of the group, or someone
stands on a stage or on a desk and begins shouting, through gestures, IE. A
person points, throws books or jumps up and down; the dominant voice or voices
take charge of the linguistic space. In
a chatroom the linguistic space is constantly rearranged through the coming and
going of voices.
INTENTIONS
IN CHATROOMS
As
in any form of communication when we write in a chatroom we write with
intentions. The intentions can be to
ask a question (IE. “Does anyone
know…?), to start a new thread (IE. “
“), To continue, change, disrupt or any of a series of intended
illocutionary actions are begun with but a few words.
Indirect
Speech Acts in Chatrooms
How
is a dialogue begun, continued, or understood with only three or four words,
half of which may be misspelt plus an abbreviation or two in an utterance? How do we instantly interpret and give
meaning instantly beyond the literal description in front of us?
What
I will try to do here is to explain how the speaker/hearer/writer of a text in
a chatroom can understand several strains of conversation flashing by,
sometimes at the rate of twenty or more speech acts per minute. And not only understand but be able to
abstract a particular thread or utterance and create a dialogue with it.
In
some chatrooms, as will be explored in the Sex Chatrooms; it is quite clear
what participators respond to. If
someone has a user name of <hot18f> and their utterance is “I so hot
tonight”, even with rapidly scrolling text there will be instantly a lot of
responses to <hot18f>. Of course
<hot18f> could be a middle age male writing from death row in Texas for
murder and rape of young females. Who
is writing is not questioned. It is the
text which illicite the response and nothing else. Intention is quite clear on both the speaker and the listener
then respondent’s part. We will come
back to this later.
In
this particular chatroom we are exploring now, astrochat, I am looking at the
illocutionary acts as Searle (1975a) explains these acts.
When
one reads a scrolling text they are faced with several choices of how to deal
with the context of the message.
There are many more variations to these overall
global chatroom response themes and I will explore these contextually using all
the theories I have used in the various chatrooms in chapter 7, which is the
discussion of ‘Conversational analysis of chatroom “talk”’.
Searle,
John R. 1975a. Indirect speech acts. Peter Cole and Jerry L, Morgan (eds.), Syntax
and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press, 59-82.
History
of speech act theory:
Thomas
Reid - “social operations” or “social
acts” such as promising, warning or forgiving, as opposed to the “solitary
acts” of the individual, such as judging, intending or deliberating.
F.
Brentano and Husserl = originates SAT –Austro-German phenomenologist
Husserl - developed his theory of “objectifying
acts: his approach leads to a view of uttered sentences of all sorts as
abbreviated statements about certain underlying non-linguistic mental acts or
states, for, beside other reasons, the sincerity of e.g a questions coincides
with the truth of the corresponding statement.
Daubert
Pfander
Schwarz
Marty
Reinach
the true founder of SPT, the first to clearly realize that linguistic acts are
not just descriptive statements about intentional states. Deals with illocutionary acts in the context
of a legal philosophy.
Buhler
Bibliography
Crosby,
John. Speech act theory and
phenomenology in Burkhardt, Armin. Ed. Speech acts, meaning, and
intentions: critical approaches to the philosophy of John R. Searle Walter
de Gruyter & Co., Berlin, 1990, p. 63.
Pierce,
C. S. 1931-58. Collected Papers. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Jakobson,
R., The Framework of Language. Michigan Studies in the Humanities 1980 .
Sebeok
1976
Todorov
1977
Vanderveken,
Daniel. On the Unification of Speech Act Theory and Formal Semantics in
Cohen, Phil; Morgan, Jerry; Pollack, Martha. Intentions in Communication. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990.
p.195 – 220..
[i] This is a re-working of the Aristolian statements in the first
chapter of his De interpretatione: “Every sentence is significant [...],
but not every sentence is a statement-making sentence, but only those in which
there is truth or falsity. There is not truth or falsity in all sentences: a
prayer is a sentence but is neither true nor false. The present investigation
deals with the statement-making sentence; the others we can dismiss, since
consideration of them belongs rather to the study of rhetoric or poetry.” (17 a
1-5, Edghill translation). Barry Smith, Towards a History of Speech Act Theory, an essay rewritten from "Materials
Towards a History of Speech Act Theory" which appeared in Karl Bühler's
Theory of Language (Amsterdam 1988), edited by Achim Eschbach. The revised
essay appears on the World Wide Web: http://wings.buffalo.edu/philosophy/faculty/smith/articles/speechact.html#N_1_ last accessed 13/09/2001.
[ii] linguistic philosophers