The deficiency of speech act theory

Speech acts can not only describe and point to things, but also convey pragmatic intention or pragmatic intention. No matter whether the intention of performance in discourse is explicit or implicit, the view that the intention of performance can always be expressed by the sentence of performance is the assumption of performance (Sadock, 1988).

It can be seen that scholars who hold this hypothesis believe that Wei's poems contain or imply Wei Shi verbs, and the subject is singular in the first person. However, the assumption that only acts as a verb has the following three shortcomings:

A. There are formal or grammatical means to distinguish behavioral verbs from other verbs;

B. The appearance of performative verbs does not necessarily guarantee the implementation of certain behaviors, such as ritual performative sentences, cooperative performative sentences, etc., which are limited by necessary and appropriate conditions. Otherwise, words and deeds differ, and metalanguage performative sentences will also produce similar problems;

C. You can do things with words and deeds instead of acting as verbs.

This assumption is directly challenged by indirect speech acts. This laid the foundation for Searle to put forward the theory of indirect speech act later.

Social culture

Speech act theory can explain many helpless language phenomena such as syntax, real conditional semantics and so on. It can be seen that the contribution of speech act theory is undeniable, but any theory is incomplete.

To some extent, both Austin and Searle insist on the conventionality or habituation of speech acts, but Searle also emphasizes intentionality. He believes that politeness is the most important motivation for using indirect speech acts (such as "request"), but he ignores the social and cultural characteristics that affect politeness in speech acts.

Koyama( 1997) criticized this, arguing that the two concepts of "speaker" and "listener" as the basis of speech acts also have cultural characteristics, so that speakers and listeners from different cultural backgrounds will show different characteristics in human communication and language use.

Rosado (1982) thinks that speech act theory ignores the restrictive effect of important situational and cultural factors on language use. Knowing how to speak is how to match words with deeds, and when to match words with deeds. On this basis, he objected to Searle's division of speech acts into assertion, instruction, commitment, expression and declaration. ), because such classification is not the basis of cross-cultural typology in language use.

At the same time, Wierzbicka (1985) points out that speech acts such as promises, orders and warnings are implemented by conventional means in English, while they are culturally dependent in some languages, so the cultural particularity of speech acts should be emphasized.

Constraint condition

When commenting on speech acts, Meyer (1993) also thinks that speech acts should be combined with people's social environment. In addition, he put forward the concept of "pragmatic behavior" from the perspective of society and language.

From a social point of view, speech acts should involve certain social constraints, such as the speaker's special education, age, gender, occupation and so on. These constraints constitute part of the background information in people's communication.

From the linguistic point of view, Meyer is concerned about the language forms that can be used to implement a pragmatic act and what kind of language and language forms can be used to promote the pragmatic behavior of idioms.

According to Verschuern (1999), this is the problem of language adaptability. Speech act is a part of pragmatic act, and its understanding depends on contextual conditions and communicative purposes. Therefore, pragmatic behavior is restricted by contextual conditions and is an adaptive behavior. Context includes social customs, culture, social structure or suitable conditions.

Supported by this view, Meyer believes that the previous speech act theory cannot explain the social basis of speech act.