Page 62 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

39 What Is Universal Pragmatics?

in the same way that propositionally nondifferentiated and non-
verbal actions express a presupposed norm. To explain what acts
of betting or christening mean, I must refer to the institutions of
betting or christening. By contrast, commands or.advice or ques-
tions do not represent institutions but types of speech acts that
can fit very different institutions. To be sure, ‘‘institutional bond”
is a criterion that does not always permit an unambiguous classi-
fication. Commands can exist wherever relations of authority are
institutionalized; appointments presuppose special, bureaucrati-
cally developed organizations; and marriages require a single
institution (which is, however, found universally). But this
does not destroy the usefulness of the analytic point of view.
Institutionally unbound speech actions, insofar as they have any
regulative meaning at all, are related to various aspects of action
norms in general; they are not essentially fixed by particular in-
stitutions.
We can now define the desired analytic units as propositionally
differentiated and institutionally unbound speech actions. Natur-
ally, only those with an explicit linguistic form are suitable for
analysis. Usually the context in which speech actions are em-
bedded makes standard linguistic forms superfluous; for example,
when the performative meaning is determined exclusively by the
context of utterance; or when the performative meaning is only
indicated, that is, expressed through inflection, punctuation, word
position, or particles such as “isn’t it?,” “‘right?,” “indeed,”
“clearly,” “surely,” and similar expressions.
Finally we shall exclude those explicit speech actions in stan-
dard form that appear in contexts that produce shifts of meaning.
This is the case when the pragmatic meaning of a context-
dependent speech act diverges from the meaning of the sentences
used in it (and from that of the indicated conditions of a gen-
eralized context that have to be met for the type of speech action
in question). Searle’s “principle of expressibility” takes this into
account: assuming that the speaker expresses his intention pre-
cisely, explicitly, and literally, it is possible in principle for every
speech act carried out or capable of being carried out to be speci-
fied by a complex sentence.
Kanngiesser has given this principle the following form: ‘For
every meaning x, it is the case that, if there is a speaker S in a