| Course Description |
The central insight of speech act theory is that speakers perform many different actions with
language. Words can be used to assert, question, command, promise, beg, bet, marry, arrest,
bequeath, request, refuse, threaten, subordinate, silence, complain, etc. Even the very same
words can on one occasion be a straightforward assertion, on another occasion be a promise,
and another a threat. Speech act theory investigates how it is that speakers do all these
things with words: how does a speaker succeed in communicating the force of her words?
What effects do these have? How much (if anything) is a matter of convention and how much
(if anything) is a matter of speaker’s intentions or the speaker’s state of mind more generally?
This class is divided into roughly three sections, though the topics from each section overlap.
The first third of the course is an historical overview of classic speech act theory. The second
third is on more recent and more formal theoretical developments; we look at work by both
philosophers and linguists in their development of concepts such as discourse context, context
change, presuppostion, and convention, as well as formal analyses of things like sentence
mood and imperatives. The final third is on applications of speech act theory (drawing from
theoretical ideas from the first two-thirds of the class) to issues of social, political, and ethical
importance, e.g. propaganda, pornography, hate speech, free speech, dogwhistles, and social
institutions.
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