Foreword

This volume is a collection of papers discussed at the workshop on "Speech Acts and Linguistic Research", a participant symposium held during the First International Summer Institute in Cognitive Science, Center for Cognitive Science, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, July 15-17, 1994. The organisation of a symposium devoted to speech acts at the First International Summer Institute in Cognitive Science was, in a certain sense, due, since the importance of the theory of speech acts in cognitive research in general is uncontroversial. it was at the turn of this century that the idea of speaking as a form of action began to be investigated systematically by German and Austrian philosophers and it was only in the second half of this century, thanks mainly to J.L. Austin's and J. Searle's work, that this approach became standard and influential. The applications of the categories and distinctions of speech act theory have been fruitful in many different areas, not necessarily related, such as psychology, artificial intelligence, sociology, law and so forth.One feature of this varied research is that it does not share a set of questions or methodology. This absence of a common methodological background or theoretical tenets, grouping together in a natural class the full range of the sciences in which the theory of speech acts may be involved, may pave the way for the development of a multidisciplinary framework, where several dimensions are bound together in a peculiar way. This suggests that speech acts should be treated ontologically , in a way which can yield a general theory of the given structures, a theory embracing within a single frame not merely their linguistic and logical aspects but also psychological, legal and action-theoretic moments of the phenomena in hand. Promises, claims and obligations, etc. are entities of special sorts (Barry Smith 1990: 48). The aim of our workshop was to discuss some issues concerning the interrelations of speech acts and linguistic theories. Such a wide application of speech act theory to so many different fields has involved many different languages, from those of Indo-European derivation, such as Russian or English, to Japanese and Korean, from Semitic to Australian aboriginal languages, and in some cases to regional and to social varieties of the same language; so we might expect that different theoretical frameworks would, though rather slowly, develop for a comparative study across languages, perhaps reframing the role of linguistics with respect to other disciplines.