Speech Acts and Their Emplotment
Siu L. Chow · 2019
Sspeech-act theorists remind psychologists of the importance of the pragmatics of language. Their contribution may be even greater had there been an effort to link the speech-act research to the studies of indirect speech in psycholinguistics. As speech dominates our daily life, much about the mental life may be learned from the referential function of our speech. The uniqueness of an individual is not determined by some noumenal attributes, but by what can be said about the individual. The chapter examines critically the speech-act assumptions. Speech-act theorists have another reason to be skeptical of mental activities such as thinking, wishing, feeling, and the like: These activities are not observable like running or jumping. In concentrating exclusively on pragmatics, speech-act theorists have neglected the referential function of language. The speech-act approach to the social function of language is ironically not unlike Skinner’s approach to verbal behavior.