Langue e Parole in Speech Act Theories: some Considerations and a Proposal

Although relevant insights into the action-character of linguistic phenomena and the idea of speaking as a form of action dates back to Greek grammatical speculations, it was only in the second half of this century that this approach became standard and influential. There has been a wide application of speech act theory to many different fields, psychology, sociology, cognitive science. This research, involving many different languages and mostly aimed at parole theories, has stressed the importance of the role of communication in language, often distinguishing a communicative, or, in a rather broad sense, linguistic capacity from the capacity to have linguistic representations in a narrow sense. However, in one of the first systematic proposals it was argued that although it might seem that the speech acts approach is simply, in Saussurian terms, a study of parole, rather than langue, "an adequate study of speech acts is a study of langue" (Searle, 1969, p. 17). Nevertheless, contrary to possible expectations, the state of the art suggests that this interface has been only partially explored. On the one hand, the literature on speech acts has revealed only desultory interest in linguistic theories. On the other hand, only a few of the linguistic phenomena dealt with in speech act theory have been the object of intensive research in linguistic theory. The contribution of grammatical theory in proposing and developing hypotheses about the recognition and the interpretation of speech acts, such as the analysis of the linguistic features relevant to their formulation and to their interpretation, is somewhat controversial and less developed than expected. This might seem curious, considering that these studies, which deal with problems concerning the nature of the rules and of the conventions which make our conversations effective and appropriate, almost always presuppose grammatical competence. In many cases, the specification of the type of act performed in saying something, whether it is a question, a request for action, or a wish, has a grammatical codificationHowever, the linguistic description of the cluster of morphosyntactic features which,without reliance on any extralinguistic context, permit the interpretation of an utterance as an assertion or as a question or as an order, is instead very often unsatisfactory. Not only has the range of variations of different grammatical features involved not been systematically discussed in a cross language perspective, but there is also a great deal of variation in form and function within a given language, whose role has to be reconsidered.. The fact that the same utterance can be interpreted in different ways according to the context in which it is said, justifies, if not explains, the widespread lack of methodologically clear-cut distinctions between the grammatical and pragmatic properties of what is said. The reasons why speech acts are interesting as a link between language and communication, language and action, are also a cause of theoretical and methodological difficulties in attaining descriptive adequacy, when dealing at the same time with both sentences and utterances, and when applying controversial distinctions at the boundaries between the grammatical and pragmatic properties of what is said. I will argue that the complexity of the langue phenomena, on one hand, and the parole phenomena, on the other hand that a speech act theory has to explain, or at least accomodate may have brought about confusion and imprecision leading to rather approximate linguistic descriptions of the illocutionary force devices, or of the candidates for such a role, that is the role of giving an utterance its literal force. It has encouraged, at the same time, the prevalence in the recent literature of positions which neglect or reject the literal aspect of speech acts and give preferential analysis to the inferential and contextual aspects.The aim of this paper is to defend the importance of an adequate descriptive analysis of the set of morphosyntactic criteria which have developed around the notion of linguistic illocutionary force devices. They are intended as the linguistic elements that permit the interpretation of an utterance as an act of a particular kind, i.e. as a request for action, a question, an assertion, an urge, and so on. Following a tradition of research which clearly associates grammatical properties with types of speech acts, the descriptive adequacy of some of the linguistic categories most commonly adopted in the representation of the illocutionary force devices is discussed with regard to some Indo-European languages.