Page 61 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

38 Communication and Evolution of Society

speech acts. In short, propositionally differentiated speech leaves
the actor more degrees of freedom in relation to a recognized
normative background than does a nonlinguistic interaction.
Of course, propositionally differentiated utterances do not al-
ways have a linguistic form, as is shown by the example of
grammaticalized sign language, for example, the standardized
language of the deaf and dumb. In this connection, one might
also mention pointing gestures, which represent an equivalent use
of referential terms and thus supplement propositional speech.
On the other hand, there are also speech actions that are not
propositionally differentiated: namely, illocutionarily abbreviated
speech actions, such as ‘Hello!’ as a greeting formula, or
“Check!” and “Checkmate!” as performative expressions for
moves in a game and their consequences. The circumstance that
a propositional component is lacking places the verbal utterances
on a level with normal nonverbal actions; while such actions do
refer to the propositional content of a presupposed convention,
they do not express it.
As a first step in delimiting the pragmatic units of analysis,
we can specify—out of the set of communicative actions that
rest on the consensual foundation of reciprocally raised and rec-
ognized validity claims—the subset of propositionally diff erenti-
ated speech actions. But this specification is not selective enough;
for among these utterances we find such speech acts as ‘‘betting,”’
»
“christening,” “‘appointing,’’ and so on. Despite their proposi-
tionally differentiated content, they are bound to a single institu-
tion (or to a narrowly circumscribed set of institutions); they can
therefore be seen as the equivalent of actions that fulfill presup-
posed norms, either nonverbally or in an illocutionarily abbrevi-
ated way. The znstitutional bond of these speech acts can be seen
in (among other things) the fact that the permissible proposi-
tional contents are narrowly limited by the normative meaning of
betting, christening, appointing, marrying, and so on. One bets
for stakes, christens with names, appoints to official positions,
mafries a partner, and so on. With institutionally bound speech
actions, specific institutions are always involved. With institution-
ally unbound speech actions, only conditions of a generalized
context must typically be met for a corresponding act to succeed.
Institutionally bound speech actions express a specific institution