Chapter5 Speech Acts.ppt

Chapter5 Speech Acts5.1 History and Introduction 5.2 Promises5.3 Speech Act Verbs5.4 Indirect Speech Acts5.5 Classifying Speech Acts An Overview of This Chapter How can we determine a speech act?(5.1---5.2) How many speech acts are there,and how are they expressed in language?(5.3---5.5) 5.1History and Introduction In the sixties and early seventies of last century, philosophers of language focus their attention on semantic aspects of language. Richard Montague（理查兹·蒙塔古） An American mathematician and philosopher, he and his school are prime exponents of intensional semantics（内涵语义学） Rudolf Carnap（鲁道夫·卡尔纳普） Rudolf Carnap is a leading member of the Vienna Circle and prominent advocate of logical positivism（逻辑实证主义）, also called logical empiricism or Neo-positivism. Much of the semantic work done by philosophers of language during this period rested upon the “truth-functional”（真值函数的）definitions of semantics in the Carnapian tradition. Philosophers working in the truth-functional tradition restrict themselves to “propositions”（命题）. John L. Austin and Ordinary Language Philosophy John Austin (1911-1960) Austin was not a linguist at all but a philospher, working at Oxford University in the 1940s and 1950s. How to Do Things with Words (1962) Ordinary Language Philosophy Austin, his almost equally influential pupil Grice and a group of like-minded philosophers working at Oxford and elsewhere came to be known as ordinary language philosophers. The ordinary language philosophers were mainly reacting against “Logical Positivists” such as Oxford-based philosophers Moore and Russell. Ordinary Language Philosophy vs. Logical Positivism Ordinary Language Philosophy Language can be used effectively unproblematically Interest: how people do things with words Logical Positivism Language is deficient, defective, ambiguous, vague, contradictory and need to be refined Austin’s Dist