Speech Act Theory: The Philosophical Controversy

Abstract

This article is intended to critically assess speech act theory from a philosophical perspective. The theory of speech acts has undeniably enriched meaning theory and provided a fresh view for research in the fields of philosophy of language, meaning, pragmatics, and other related areas, thereby further deepening people's understanding of meaning. Speech act theoretic research has to some extent assumed that the theory is firmly grounded and thus mainly focused on evaluating the theory in terms of its development and taxonomies, exploring its application to literature, comparing/relating it with/to other pragmatic notions such as politeness, implicature, inference, etc., or validating its usefulness in language teaching contexts. Speech act theory, however, is not without its share of flaws, such as the inclination to disregard the intrinsic meaning of language components and also the status of the perlocutionary act, terminological confusion, the blurred constative/performative distinction, and the distinction between locutionary and illocutionary acts, the performative hypothesis and circumstances under which felicity conditions apply.