Page 73 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

50 Communication and Evolution of Society

meaning of a sentence with propositional content; the illocutionary
component of a speech act neither expresses a proposition nor men-
tions a propositional content.”®
c. It is equally unsatisfactory to equate illocutionary force with the
meaning components that are added to the meaning of a sentence
through the act of utterance.
d. From a universal-pragmatic point of view, the meanings of lin-
guistic expressions can be categorically distinguished according to
whether they can appear only in sentences that take on a representa-
tional function or whether they can specifically serve to establish inter-
personal relations or to express intentions.8°

Thematization of Validity Claims and Modes of Communication

Austin’s contrast of locutionary and illocutionary acts has become
important not only for the theory of meaning; the discussions
about basic types of speech action and basic modes of language
has also fastened on to this pair of concepts. At first Austin wanted
to draw the boundary in such a way that “the performative should
be doing something as opposed to just saying something; and the
performative is happy or unhappy as opposed to true and false.” *
From this there results the following correlations:

locutionary acts: constatives, true/untrue.
illocutionary acts: performatives, happy/unhappy.

But this demarcation of locutionary and illocutionary acts could
not be maintained when it became apparent that all speech ac-
tions—the constative included—contain a locutionary component
(in the form of a sentence with propositional content) and an
illocutionary component (in the form of a performative sen-
tence) .8* What Austin had first introduced as the locutionary act
was now replaced by (a) the propositional component contained
in every explicit performative utterance, and (b) a special class
of illocutionary acts that imply the validity claim of truth—con-
stative speech acts. Austin himself later regarded constative speech
acts as only one of the different classes of speech acts. The two
:
sentences