Page 59 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

36 Communication and Evolution of Society

I shall hold to the following terminological rules. An explicit
speech action satisfies the standard form in its surface structure if
it is made up of an d/locutionary and a propositional component.
The illocutionary component consists in an d/locutionary act carried
out with the aid of a performative sentence. This sentence is
formed in the present indicative, affirmative, and has as its logical
subject the first person and as its logical (direct) object the sec-
ond person; the predicate, constructed with the help of a per-
formative expression, permits in general the particle “hereby.” ©
The performative component needs to be completed by a prop-
ositional component constructed by means of a sentence with
propositional content. Whenever it is used in constative speech
acts, the sentence with propositional content takes the form of a
propositional sentence { Aussagesatz}. In its elementary form, the
propositional sentence contains: (1) a mame or a referring ex-
pression, with the aid of which the speaker identifies an object
about which he wants to say something; and (2) a predicate ex-
pression for the general determination that the speaker wants to
grant or deny to the object. In nonconstative speech acts, the
propositional content is not stated but mentioned; in this case,
propositional content coincides with what is usually called the
unasserted proposition. (Thus IJ distinguish between the nominal-
ized proposition “‘that p,’’ which expresses a state of affairs, and
the proposition “p,”” which represents a fact and which owes its
assertoric force to the circumstance that it is embedded in a speech
action of the type “‘assertion,” and is thereby connected with an
illocutionary act of asserting. In formal logic, of course, we treat
propositions as autonomous units. Only the truth value we assign
to “‘p”’ in contradistinction to ‘‘that p’” is a reminder of the con-
nection of the proposition with some constative speech act, a
connection that is systematically ignored. )*°
I shall call speech acts that have this structure propositionally
differentiated. They are distinguished from symbolically mediated
interactions—for example, a shout of ‘‘Fire!’’ that releases com-
plementary actions, assistance, or flight—in that a propositional
component of speech is uncoupled from the illocuttonary act, so
that (1) the propositional content can be held invariant across
changes in illocutionary potential, and (2) the holistic mode of