In What Sorts Of Situations Can Language Be Considered An Action?

Language, commonly seen as a particular psychological or behavioural phenomenon, with a conceptual status comparable to other phenomena, such as learning and thinking. Subsequently, this essay will argue that language avoids the psychological condition and represents the functional aspects in which behaviour emerges and becomes action. This paper elucidates the foundations of this pragmatic speech act theory as formulated by its leading figures, philosopher and linguist J. L Austin and John Searle. The first section of this essay explores Austin’s theory of speech acts and this will be followed by John Searle’s interpretation and extension of speech act and the different contexts in which they can be applied. Moreover, the second section identifies a more recent gender theory in the 21st century; that gender and thus identity is the social effect and “performative” action explored by feminist poststructuralist Judith Butler and Jennifer Coates. Conclusively, the notion of language as action will be analysed in different cultures languages put forward by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and this will be extended to explore cultural dance as a form of language.

Acts of speaking can be observed as actions intended to achieve a specific purpose by verbal communication. By this description, everyday utterances can be thought of as speech acts that can be recognised in terms of their intended purposes of questions, assertions, and requests. The title of J.L Austin’s How to do Things with Words conveys the essence of speech act theory. Essentially, the speech act theory is the interdisciplinary study of the wide range of things we do with words. Austin investigated special class of utterances where, social actions are performed when spoken in the appropriate circumstances. The idea of performativity from Austin’s position “is derived from the word ‘perform’, the usual verb with the noun ‘action’”. This indicates that the use of the utterance of the performing of the action. Utterances such as ‘I know pronounced you husband and wife’, where the persons involved are performing the action of marrying and ‘I name this baby Elizabeth’ where the to ‘name’ is the act of naming. Further, Austin maintains that the ‘context’ in which the utterance is spoken must be investigated along with the utterance itself.

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Austin then discovered that a speaker can simultaneously perform three acts when issuing an utterance. The first is the locutionary act; the act of saying something with a sense of position. This situation can be demonstrated when someone says “' Text her!' meaning by 'text' shoot and referring by 'her ' to her. When the locutionary act comes into examination, there is a direct correlation to speakers using them to ask or answer a question, give assurance or a warning, announce a verdict or intent. These so-called statements or locutionary utterances also occur as some specific actions; they too are performative rather than referential. Austin then exhibited us that the force of an utterance, that which a person does in uttering it, is not the same as the propositional content of the utterance. He labelled this additional element the ‘illocutionary act’. Lastly, the perlocutionary act is the act performed by saying something. Following on from the previous example of shooting, if someone was to say, “He got me to (or made me) text her”, this would be classified as a perlocutionary act. Austin, therefore, points out that language use which involves action opens up an entirely new path in the philosophy of language. All three acts, locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary are usually performed at the same time.

Austin’s unexpected and early death left many unanswered questions to the theory of speech acts. Later, Searle brought the aspects of the speech act theory to higher dimensions. Although Searle agrees that speech acts are both meaningful and a conventional force, he studies the dimensions of the speech act otherwise. The difference is Searle’s hypothesising a propositional act, which is sectioned into a reference act and an act of predication. What Searle noted is that, for a performative to have any impact on the future, it has to adhere to certain conventions that have already been established. For example, society needs to receive the authority of the judge and the form of declaration. Searle also proposed that declaratives are issued from an institutional standpoint to conclude contracts, close meetings, initiate relationships, etc. According to Searle they have 'two directions of fit' where in saying X, they produce X or 'they both state a fact and produce it'. Declaratives can produce new social facts because they are backed by institutional and legal norms. For instance, Searle believes that a declaration of marriage gets backing from the institution of marriage and family. Searle tends to decrease the illocutionary content of all speech acts to those of declaratives. In addition, for every illocutionary act is seen as an intentional action. Therefore, in accordance to Searle’s extended research, speakers are seen to attempt to perform their successful illocutionary acts.

Butler in Discourses if Gender and Sexuality identifies a further, large-scaled performative effect. Although Butler does not strictly follow to an Austianian notion of speech-act theory, occasionally reciting Searle, the notion that speech does something beyond the intended semantic and syntactical meanings rests as a central aspect of her findings. She contends that gender is a social effect that is led by performance. Gender identity “is a performative accomplishment,” she writes, “compelled by social sanction and taboo…. Gender is… an identity instituted through a repetition of acts.” Butler argues that we are the gender that we present the world. To say that gender is “performative” is different as for something to be “performative” means that it creates a series of effects on how we act, speak and talk in ways that amalgamate an impression of being classed as a man or being a woman. So, therefore, to say gender is “performative” is to say that nobody is a gender from the beginning. Butler explains how such features of our speech, bearing, appearance is socially ‘read’ as performing gendered or sexual subjectivity. This repetition of gendered performance generates a sense of how ‘natural’ it is to act in such a way to the extent that we feel that it is an expression of some inner gendered essential self. Butler argues that the sense of our inner nature as men or women is created by the repetition of actions that are performed in accordance with the constraints of discourses of gender. Resultingly, the conventional belief is then that our inner gendered nature is given, and that our actions are the external manifestations or expression of something inner; instead for Butler, our gendered and sexual identities are performed by external constraints. Therefore, gender is not so much a thing but a process by which patterns of language and action begin to repeat themselves.

British feminist linguist, Jennifer Coates offered a different approach where she studied the speech of men and woman in all-male and all-female environments. She discovered that in female conversations, all women were more typically like to participate equally rather than a singular woman to hold the floor. This was a direct contrast to that of all-men conversational groups, where there was little sharing involved. Coates further conducted research that showed the different topics that different genders talk about. While men appeared to avoid self-disclosure and preferred talking on impersonal topics, women preferred to talk about their feelings as well as other people. This demonstrates the different types of communication as an action between genders. Men are motivated through the competitiveness of the conversation to achieve a certain status for themselves whereas women focus on their relationship with other people. Therefore, language as an action can be additionally classed into gendered types of communication as presented by Coates.

An alternative way to look at the relationship between language, meaning, and culture within is to see language as part of the mental construct used to reflect cultural interactions that are the vestige of earlier cognitive evolution. The hypothesis held by Sapir and Whorf explains that a languages grammar positions speaker to certain aspects of actions and shapes the way they mentally represent that action. In this way, speakers of different languages may represent similar states of language quite differently. Whorf anticipated that using language as a mechanism to encrypt experience results in a parallelism between cognitive structures and linguistics. As a consequence, speakers of different languages interpret language as an action differently.

Intercultural, indigenous and aboriginal dance embodies verbal language within dance vocabularies that are communicated through action. In different social and cultural contexts, people use their native language and/or other languages to communicate with one another to achieve specific purposes. De Saussure characterised the basic unit of meaning in language as a sign, a unit consisting of a sound or acoustic element known as a signifier and a conceptual element with a lexical meaning known as a sign. To consider dance movement as a sign is to assume that the non-natural relationship obtains between movement, the signifier, and the concept to which it refers, the signified; therefore, one assumes that such a relationship can be constituted in various ways. Choreographic signs are typically strictly encoded in magic, ritual, or religious symbols, and semiosis is given to the individual while the role of 'intelligent consciousness' is crucial for the engendering of meaning in other choreographic words. The creator of the dance interprets the world and those who carry on the dance 'interpret' in their turn the choreographic discourse. The images which dance creates combine in various proportions visual values and messages. They have a true referent, or a mental representation, and a choreographic sign is also a possible 'interpretant' of another sign, a theoretically unlimited semiotic process. Therefore, Aboriginal and other Indigenous dance is a particular configuration of the time-space-energy system and in contrast to the linear nature of spoken language the nature of movement and body language is a multi-dimensional expression that can be seen as an action.

The limits of the language are the boundaries of the world. Words in actions or actions generate different outcomes concerning other persons depending on the setting and cultural environment in which they are used. Language fundamentally can be classified as an action, an action that can be transmuted into the 21st century and beyond encompassing the situational effectiveness of words and expressions as parts of actions. Furthermore, language becomes significant to psychology in terms of its “performative nature”, and because of this performative, this encompasses concepts with Austin and Searle may have never imagined. Language encompasses many different cultures and within methods of tradition and history, comes language that is passed on to generations through dance. Dance, therefore, can be categorised as a means of communicating language.

References

1. Austin, J.L. 1999, ‘How to Do Things with Words’. The Discourse Reader. Eds. A. Jaworski & N. Coupland. London, New York: Routledge. 63-75.
2. Butler, Judith. 'Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.' Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519-31. Accessed May 15, 2020. doi:10.2307/3207893.
3. Butler, J. 1999. ‘Subversive Bodily Acts’ [extract]. Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. 134-136, 139-141.
4. Evans, N. (2010). Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us. Chichester: Wiley.
5. McNamara, T. 2019. 'Discourses of Gender and Sexuality'. Language and Subjectivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 22-45.
6. Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts : An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=sso&db=cat00006a&AN=melb.b1087687&site=eds-live&scope=site.
7. Whorf, B. 1956. 'The relation of habitual thought and behaviour to language'. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Ed. J. Carroll. London: Wiley. 134 - 140.