Speech Act Analysis

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Overseer: Ryan Sikes

Introduction

A speech act is an act that a speaker performs when making an utterance (SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms). Speech act theory assumes that language does something, and it builds on the recognition that there is more to communication than the exchange of propositions. Take, for example, the statement, “I’m tired.” The speaker of this sentence likely intends to convey more than an assertion (i.e. a truth claim). Depending on the situation, the speaker may be doing something else with their words. For example, the speaker may be declining an offer (perhaps to go for a bike ride), complaining (perhaps because the bike ride has gone on too long), or agreeing (when a fellow biker comments on post-ride fatigue). See Appendix A for more on J.L. Austin's pioneering work in speech act theory.

The Psalms contain a wide variety of speech acts, e.g.:

• "How long, YHWH?" (Ps 13:2) – lament
• "They have done abominable deeds. There is none who does good" (Ps 14:1) – description
• "Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit" (Ps 34:14) – exhortation
• "Remember, YHWH, for David's sake, everything that he endured" (Ps 132:1) – request
• "(Someone) from your offspring, I will place on your throne" (Ps 132:11) – vow

Speech act analysis is particularly important when communicating cross-culturally, since “speech acts are realized from culture to culture in different ways [which] may result in communication difficulties that range from the humorous to the serious.” What to a person in one culture, for instance, is a polite yet succinct turndown of an offer, might be a blunt, rude dismissal to someone in another culture. Because understanding and translating the Bible is a cross-cultural endeavor, it is important to consider both how biblical language “acts” and how the target language performs the same action.

Another, more general, benefit of considering speech acts as part of the interpretive process is that it reminds us of the interpersonal nature of textual communication. As Jeannine Brown says in her book Scripture as Communication, "Autonomous texts cut off from their authors do not warn, promise, or covenant. People warn, people promise, people covenant."

Steps

1. Format the speech act table

We will be using the Discourse spreadsheet created in Close-but-Clear.

In the Speech Act portion of the Discourse spreadsheet, we must first demarcate the units of our analysis. The smallest unit of Speech Act analysis is the utterance. For our purposes, this is the same as the grammatical sentence (independent clause plus any dependent clauses). This means that dependent clauses (even if constituting a separate poetic line) should not be treated on their own, but as part of the main clause.

For example, there are two poetic lines in Ps 132:12:

12a) If your descendants keep my covenant and my laws that I will teach them,

12b) then their descendants will also forever sit on your throne.

While these clauses form two poetic lines, as a conditional sentence, v. 12a (the protasis) is dependent on v. 12b (the apodosis). Taken together, these clauses constitute only one speech act (vow). The sentence should not be analyzed by its constituent clauses, but rather as a whole.

Without modifying the clausal divisions of the other sections of the Discourse spreadsheet, this is how to demarcate the utterance units for our Speech Act and Emotional analyses:

• Identify all dependent (non-fragment) clauses.
• Merge each dependent clause with its main clause:
  • Select all Speech Act and Emotional Analysis cells that belong to a single utterance (i.e., the dependent clause with its main clause).
  • On the Google Sheets toolbar, click the "Select merge type" arrow and select "Merge vertically."

• Repeat the above steps for all dependent clauses.

Proceed to complete the Speech Act portion of the table using the following guidelines.

2. Complete the speech act table

Overview:

1. Sentence type
2. Illocution type (general)
3. Illocution type (with context)
4. Macro speech act
5. Intended perlocution
6. Notes

Sentence type

Sentence type refers to the most basic sentence mood: declarative, imperative, or interrogative.

These three basic sentence types have been found useful cross-linguistically, though they may be marked differently for different languages (e.g. through verbal affixes, particles, intonation patterns, word order) or may be unmarked. The three sentence types have three general communicative functions:

• Declarative: statement, a descriptive function
• Imperative: command, a directive function (this includes classic second-person directives, but also first-person directives [Heb. cohortative] and third-person directives [Heb. jussive]).
• Interrogative: question, also a directive function (see illocution type below)

In addition to these three basic sentence types, we also make a distinction between sentences and fragments. If the utterance in question is a fragment, label it as such in this column.

• Fragment: an incomplete sentence that is not dependent on another clause, yet still constitutes a speech act

Typically there is a direct relationship between the formal and semantic properties of a sentence and the communicative function (illocution) of a sentence, and this is called a direct speech act. However, often there is not a direct relationship; see below for handling indirect speech acts.

Note on embedded speech: Indicate embedded speech by inserting a line within the table cell, and indicating the embedded Speech Acts in quotes and italics. The following example is from Ps 13:5a:

Illocution type (general)

For more on illocutions, see Appendix.

Illocution type (general) refers to five different sentence “actions.” The categories are from J. R. Searle, who proposed five different types of illocutionary speech act:

• Assertive - represents facts (e.g. stating, explaining, or reporting).
• Commissive - commits the speaker to doing something (e.g. promising, vowing, swearing, threatening, offering, or refusing).
• Directive - tries to persuade the addressee to do something (e.g. commanding, decreeing, requesting, petitioning, or begging).
• Declaratory - does something simply by saying it; changes reality in the act of speaking (hereby. . .) (e.g. pronouncing a couple married; “We the jury find the defendant guilty”).
• Expressive - expresses the speaker's emotion or attitude about the proposition (e.g. thanking, congratulating, apologising, consoling, complaining, praising, or greeting). An expressive specifies a psychological condition (not merely a belief in an event's factuality or intention to perform an action).

As with sentence type, provide only one illocution type per sentence. You may be able to think of additional, secondary, illocutions, but try to identify the main one.

Note on direct vs. indirect speech acts: Speech acts can be direct or indirect. Direct speech acts require less inference on the part of the addressee, because the sentence type matches its expected illocution. In other words, the structure of the utterance directly corresponds with its communicative function. The following sentences are direct speech acts, since the sentence type (or structure) matches the expected or 'default' illocution type (or communicative function):

a) “Pass me the salt.”

– Sentence type = imperative

– Illocution type = directive

b) "Did you buy eggs at the store today?"

– Sentence type = interrogative

– Illocution type = directive (question)

c) "They went to the beach on holiday."

– Sentence type = declarative

– Illocution type = assertive

On the other hand, the utterance, “Can you pass me the salt?” is an indirect speech act (sometimes called an "indirect illocution"), since its sentence type does not match its expected illocution type.

a) “Can you pass me the salt?”

– Sentence type = interrogative

– Expected Illocution type = directive (question)

– Illocution type = directive (request)

Because indirect speech acts can be difficult to translate, highlight such speech-act "mismatches" by changing the font for Sentence Type and Illocution Type (General) to bold and dark orange 1. See Appendix C for more information on identifying indirect speech acts.

In the example above from Ps 44:5–8, the declarative statement, "You are my king..." is not merely a statement of fact. Given the king-subject relationship between God and the psalmist, the utterance functions as something of a pledge of allegiance to God as king. Thus, v. 5 is a Commissive illocution. Furthermore, the declarative statements of v. 7 indicate the psalmist's psychological orientation toward human military might, and thus constitute Expressive illocutions.

Illocution type (with context)

For more on illocutions, see Appendix.

Illocution type (with context) refers to a second, more precise, illocution that briefly paraphrases the biblical text and makes its illocutionary force explicit. These categories are not limited to only five, so you may supply your own illocutionary terms.

• Bold the illocution to make it easily visible, and put it in gerund (–ing) form.
• Include a brief paraphrase of what the speech act is accomplishing.

Macro speech act

For more on macro speech acts, see Appendix.

Macro (or global) speech act refers to a sequence of speech acts that can be taken together as a whole. This step goes beyond the work of the early speech-act theorists, since it looks at the function of larger sections of discourse, but it is founded on the same principles. For example:

1. I'm hungry. May we eat lunch now?
2. Hey! How's it going? I'm calling to see if you're available to help tomorrow afternoon.

In example (1), the first sentence is itself an assertive that establishes the condition for the following speech act by providing the reason for the request. The sequence as a whole, however, is a global request. In example (2), the question ("How's it going?") is irrelevant for the main purpose of the communication. It is a politeness marker which may be important socially, but it does not contribute directly to the macro speech act being performed (global request).

The examples above are short, only two or three sentences long. However, macro speech acts function hierarchically, all the way up to the level of the entire discourse.

• In the Macro speech act column, merge cells belonging to individual utterances that belong to the larger speech act. Longer psalms may require more than one macro speech act column (insert additional columns into the Google Sheet as needed). Larger macro speech acts should be placed to the right of smaller macro speech acts.
• Bold the illocution of the macro speech act to make it easily visible, and put it in gerund (–ing) form.
• Include a brief paraphrase of what the macro speech act is accomplishing.

• The right-most macro speech act column labels should correspond to the section headings in the Speech Act Summary (see below). Keep in mind that these must be consistent with the overall "Communicative Purpose" that appears on the Synthesis visualisation.

Note: A macro speech act may be identical to its constituent parts, in which case you should re-use the illocution label from the sentence-level. However, a macro speech act may also be emergent (i.e. doing something different than any single constituent sentence), in which case the label will be different from any of its constituent sentence-level illocutions. See Appendix B for more information on macro speech acts.

Intended perlocution

For more on perlocutions, see Appendix.

Intended perlocution refers to the intended result of the speech on thoughts, feelings, or actions of the addressee.

• Identify the intended result(s) of the speech, categorized by its impact on thoughts, feelings, or actions.
• Include a brief description of the intended result of the speech on the addressee.
  • Verbs should be placed in future tense.
  • Bold the key term of the perlocution to make it easily visible.

Notes

For any difficult or ambiguous speech acts, include a note in the Speech Act Notes column of the table. If a similar text has been treated elsewhere, it is very helpful to include a link to that discussion in the notes here. These notes may be used in a variety of different settings, from the Verse-by-Verse Notes (or Translation Challenges) to the Overview video to a future display option for the Speech Act layer.

One example of a helpful speech act note is from Psalm 112, which includes a brief paragraph explaining the likely perlocution (as distinct from the illocution)--namely inspiring hope in its earliest readers, and inspiring them to imitate the celebrated man of Psalm 112.

3. Create a speech act summary

Use the global speech act labels to summarise the main speech act sections of the psalm. Use the Speech Act Summary template. Here's an example from Psalm 44.

The Speaker and Addressee bars are taken from the Participant Analysis layer. Note: If the speech act analysis is done prior to participant analysis, then you will need to identify the speaker and addressee at this stage and revise later if necessary.

Speech Act Sections refers to the main sections of the psalm as indicated by speech act shifts and as labelled in the Macro Speech Act column. These sections will usually align with the sections shown in the Macrosyntax and "At-a-Glance" visualizations, but not always. For each section, provide the Macro Speech Act heading and verse reference, as well as a brief summary of the content of that section.

Note that the speech act boxes will be colored in according to emotional content in Emotional Analysis.

Appendices

Appendix A: Austin’s Categories

Locution, Illocution, and Perlocution

J. L. Austin (1950’s) (How to Do Things with Words) is considered the pioneer of speech act analysis, and he believed that language is fundamentally performative. According to Austin, there are three parts of the whole speech act:

1. Locutionary act – “is roughly equivalent to ‘meaning’ in the traditional sense.” This is what the sentence means at the propositional level.
2. Illocutionary act – “what we do in saying something.” This is what the sentence accomplishes. This accomplishment––what the speaker does with their words––is contextual.
3. Perlocutionary act – “what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading.” This is the intended result of the speech on feelings, thoughts, or actions of the addressee.

For Austin, most utterances have all three dimensions. For example, a restaurant patron tells the server, “My soup is cold.” The locutionary act of the speaker is to communicate a locution, i.e. the propositional content that the soup has a low temperature. However, the speech act does more than state a proposition, since the illocutionary act of the speaker is to complain that the soup is cold. The corresponding (intended) perlocutionary act is to request the addressee [i.e. the restaurant server] to do something, namely, to bring a new bowl of hot soup.

Felicity Conditions

An important concept introduced by Austin is known as felicity. Felicity conditions are those conditions (or expected circumstances) that must be met for a speech act to achieve its intended purpose. They apply not to assertions making truth claims, but to performative utterances that cannot be true or false. Instead, performative utterances are either felicitous or infelicitous. For example, if a single rogue juror says to the defendant, "I find you guilty as charged," this speech act fails to accomplish its purpose because it fails to meet an important felicity condition, namely that the person announcing the verdict has the vested authority to do so.

There are several different types of felicity condition:

1. Content conditions. The content of the utterance must match the act being carried out. Example:
   – Speech acts like promises or warnings must refer to events in the future.
2. Preparatory conditions. These refer to pre-existing conditions that must be presupposed by the speaker and actually met. The speaker is permitted to do what they say, and both speaker and hearer agree that this speech act is situationally appropriate. Examples:
   – The speaker must have the appropriate authority to perform a given speech act, such as pronounce a couple married.
   – The speaker of a threat must presuppose that there is harm in the future action.
3. Sincerity conditions. The speaker must be genuine and honest, and the hearer takes the utterance to be intentional and accurate. Examples:
   – The speaker of a question must actually want the information requested for the utterance to successfully function as a question.
   – The speaker of "Congratulations!" must actually feel pleased for the addressee for the speech act of congratulating to be successful.
4. Essential conditions. The speaker is committing himself to carry out the act, and both the speaker and hearer take the utterance to be performative.

Appendix B: Global Speech Acts

Global speech acts (sometimes called macro-speech acts) are one type of discourse macrostructure. A global speech act is simply the result of a sequence of sentences that together accomplish a single, "global" speech act. This means that speech acts obtain not only at the sentence-level, but above the sentence-level, at the level of larger units of discourse. We can invite, accuse, or thank, for example, by uttering an entire discourse. And especially in conventional and/or institutional settings, both spoken and written, a single speech act (e.g. advertising, legally indicting) has conventional components (micro-speech acts) which function different in isolation.

Sometimes we accomplish this directly, by saying something like "I'd like to invite you to . . ." or "Thank you so much for . . ." and other times, we accomplish the global speech act indirectly. Corresponding to this directness or indirectness, there are two main types of global speech act:

1. Supported global speech acts. This type of global speech act is formed by a sequence of smaller acts, at least one of which is the "main" act. For example, "This artwork is beautiful. Thank you for painting it for me!" (assertive + thanks = thanks [global speech act])
2. "Emergent" (or composite) global speech acts. This type of global speech act is formed by a sequence of smaller acts, none of which is the "main" act, yet which together form an action unit (i.e. the global speech act). An analogy is the global act of constructing a house: one can lay the foundation, build walls, build the roof, etc. in the larger global act of constructing a house. The component acts, whether coordinated or subordinated (auxiliary), are intended only within the larger framework. Van Dijk calls this second type a plan. For example:

Christy: Hi Judy!

Judy: Hi Christy! How are you?

Christy: Fine, and you?

Judy: Well . . . I've had better days.

Christy: What's the matter?

Judy: Well, I was in fender-bender yesterday, and my car was damaged.

Christy: Sorry to hear that. I hope you can get it fixed easily.

Judy: Me too.

Christy: Listen, you know what? Tonight is the grand opening of the new museum . . .

Judy: Yeah, I heard about that.

Christy: I thought maybe it might be fun to go.

Judy: I'll ask Tommy. He likes history.

Christy: OK, good, do that.

Judy: Yeah, I'll call him right now.

This short conversation is an example of a global invitation. Although the cooperative conversation had several other micro-speech acts (e.g. greetings, assertives, commissives), no single utterance of Christy's is itself an invitation. Yet the conversation as a whole functions as such.

Appendix C: Indirect Speech Acts

Direct speech acts use the "default" sentence type to perform the expected function.

Although sentence type and sentence meaning can be understood as indication of the default speech act, in reality these only weakly determine the speech act of a given utterance. Depending on the context (social situation, background knowledge, etc.), a simple imperative (= sentence type) such as "Sit here" could be used as a command, request, offer, advisory, or exhortation. So the formal and semantic properties allow for communicative potential of a sentence, but context is needed to identify the speech act. (For more on sentence type and speech acts cross-linguistically, see König and Siemund, 2007.)

Indirect speech acts can take many forms (e.g. rhetorical questions) and can function in many different ways (e.g. increase politeness), and require careful attention in interpretation and translation.

Help

Common Mistakes

• Confusing Illocutions with Propositions: It can be tempting to identify a speech act's illocution as, "Stating [insert the propositional content of the sentence]." However, this would represent the utterance's locution, rather than its illocution. Identifying the illocution goes beyond the propositional content of the utterance, and describes what the speech act is accomplishing. It can be helpful, in seeking to identify the illocution, to first identify the perlocution (i.e., the speech act's intended result).
• Confusing Speech Act with Genre: What is the distinction between a lament and lamenting? The former, as a genre label, characterizes the semantic content of the text. The latter, on the other hand, describes what the text is accomplishing on a discourse level, and is the goal of this analysis. Herein lies the importance of the brief descriptions of what the illocutions and macro speech acts are doing, especially in relation to other speech acts in the psalm. Try to avoid descriptions of what the utterance is, and focus on what it does.

Additional Resources

Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Edited by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa. 2nd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1975. Read the 1st edition on archive.org.

Beekman, John, John Callow, and Michael Kopesec. The Semantic Structure of Written Communication. 5th rev. Dallas: SIL, 1981.

Brown, Jeannine. Scripture as Communication: Introducing Biblical Hermeneutics. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007. See esp. "Introduction: Scripture as Communicative Act."

Crim, Keith R. “Hebrew Direct Discourse as a Translation Problem.” The Bible Translator 24.3 (1973): 311–16. (DOI)

Dijk, T. van. Macrostructures: An Interdisciplinary Study of Global Structures in Discourse, Interaction, and Cognition. New York: Routledge, 2019. (Available on Perlego)

_____. "Pragmatic Macro-structure in Discourse and Cognition." In Studies in the Pragmatics of Discourse. The Hague, Netherlands: De Gruyter Mouton, 1981. (open access)

Gass, Susan M. Speech Acts Across Cultures: Challenges to Communication in a Second Language. Studies on Language Acquisition 11. Edited by Peter Jordens. New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996.

König, Ekkehard and Peter Siemund. "Speech Act Distinctions in Grammar." Pages 276–324 in Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Edited by Timothy Shopen. Cambridge: CUP, 2007.

Searle, J. R. Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: CUP, 1979.

___. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: CUP, 1969.

___. "What is a Speech Act?" Pages 221–39 in Philosophy in America. Edited by M. Black. London: Allen & Unwin, 1965. (link here)

Vanderveken, Daniel. Meaning and Speech Acts. Vol 1: Principles of Language Use. Cambridge: CUP, 1990. Pp. 166–219.

Vanhoozer, Kevin. “The Semantics of Biblical Literature: Truth and Scripture’s Diverse Literary Forms.” Chapter 2 in Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon. Edited by D.A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2005.

Warren, Andy. "Modality, Reference and Speech Acts in the Psalms." Ph.D. thesis, Faculty of Oriental Studies, Cambridge University, 1998. (Thesis summary published here in the Tyndale Bulletin)

Wenham, Gordon. "What Are We Doing Singing the Psalms?" Chapter 1 (pp. 13–35) in The Psalter Reclaimed: Praying and Praising with the Psalms. Wheaton: Crossway, 2013. (Perlego and Google Books)

Rubric

Dimension	Description
Completeness	The page includes every element required by the creator guidelines: Speech Act Table Verse Hebrew text (OSHB) Close-but-clear Sentence type Illocution type (general and with context) Macro speech acts Speech Act Summary Speech Act sections Content summaries Speaker/addressee panels All indirect speech acts identified with bolded orange font All embedded speech placed in quotes and italics
Quality of analysis	Each label provided is accurate and justifiable. Macro speech acts (table) match speech act sections (summary).
Depth of content	For any interpretive question(s) involving speech acts, a note identifies this alternative. For any alternatives, a brief explanation is given for preferred interpretation. Secondary sources and Bible translations (ancient and modern) are cited where appropriate in the notes.
Clarity of language	Prose notes are clear and concise. Language is not too technical so as to be inaccessible to Sarah.
Formatting/Style	Correct spelling and punctuation is used throughout. Table is properly formatted. Hebrew script (TNR) Eng. script (OpenSans) Versification Cell and font colours per Creator Guidelines Cells as tight as possible Sources are cited properly and thoroughly.

Submitting your draft

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[Speech Act Analysis Layer Rubric](https://psalms.scriptura.org/w/Speech_Act_Analysis#Rubric)

|Guardian Review|Overseer Review|Final Checks|Description|
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
|||| **Completeness**
|[ ]||| The page includes every element required by the creator guidelines.
|[ ]||| All indirect speech acts identified with bolded orange font
|[ ]||| All embedded speech placed in quotes and italics
|||| *Speech Act Table*
|[ ]||| Verse
|[ ]||| Hebrew text (OSHB)
|[ ]||| Close-but-clear
|[ ]||| Sentence type
|[ ]||| Illocution type (general and with context) 
|[ ]||| Macro speech acts
|||| *Speech Act Summary*
|[ ]||| Speech Act sections
|[ ]||| Content summaries
|[ ]||| Speaker/addressee panels 
|||| **Quality of analysis**
|[ ]|[ ]|[ ]| Each label provided is accurate and justifiable.  
|[ ]|[ ]|| Macro speech acts (table) match speech act sections (summary).
|||| **Depth of content** 
|[ ]|[ ]|| For any interpretive question(s) involving speech acts, a note identifies this alternative.
|[ ]|[ ]|| For any alternatives, a brief explanation is given for preferred interpretation. 
|[ ]|[ ]|| Secondary sources and Bible translations (ancient and modern) are cited where appropriate in the notes.
|||| **Clarity of language** 
|[ ]|[ ]|[ ]| Prose notes are clear and concise.
|[ ]|[ ]|[ ]| Language is not too technical so as to be inaccessible to [Sarah](https://psalms.scriptura.org/w/Personas).
|||| **Formatting/Style** 
|[ ]||| Correct spelling and punctuation is used throughout.
|[ ]||| Sources are cited properly and thoroughly. 
|||| *Table formatting*
|[ ]||| Table is properly formatted.
|[ ]||| Hebrew script (Times New Roman)
|[ ]||| English script (OpenSans)
|[ ]||| Versification
|[ ]||| Cell and font colours per Creator Guidelines
|[ ]||| Cells as tight as possible