However, if I successfully performed the threat I have successfully threatened the neighbor, regardless of whether the threat worked. Whether the neighbor stops shooting or not is a matter of perlocution, not of illocution.
Degree of strength of the illocutionary point: Two speech acts may have the same illocutionary point but with different strengths. Searle and Vanderveken use the examples ofrequest vs. insistsuggest vs. solemnly swearexpress regret vs. humbly apologizeHowever, we should not assume that only two-way oppositions exist, consider(12) tell vs. state vs. assert vs. attestwhich encode increasing strength and formality of the assertion (Searle & Vanderveken, 1985, p. 183; they do not analyze attest, but the extension is straightforward).
Mode of achievement: In some cases, an illocutionary act requires a “special set of conditions” for a felicitous performance of the act. For example, a witness in a trial may make a statement (an assertive) when asked if they would like a glass of water, but will be testifying when asked under oath if, say, they recognize the defendant. In this case, being the witness, being sworn under oath, being questioned by a lawyer or the judge, and so on constitute the mode of achievement. One cannot stand on the corner of the street, on one’s own, and testify (in the legal sense).
Content conditions: In many cases, the illocutionary force of the speech act will put restrictions on the proposition that the utterance must convey. For example, if one makes a promise, one cannot make it about an event that happened in the past. It would be odd, to say the least, to say I promise that if you are good, we will have eaten ice cream last week. Likewise, an apology must refer to something the speaker is responsible for:4 the utterance I apologize for the sum of the squares of the other two sides of a triangle being equal to the square of the hypotenuse is clearly odd or humorous (Searle & Vanderveken, 1985, p. 16).
Preparatory conditions: These conditions are the conditions that must obtain for the speech act to be both successful and not defective; for example, you can only successfully promise something if both the speaker and the person receiving the promise think that what is being promised is positive. Thus, it would be a defective promise to say If you behave today you will have to do all your chores tomorrow. Obviously, if the addressee believed that doing chores was a great privilege, this would be a successful promise. However, generally speaking, people do not like to do their chores.
Sincerity conditions: A successful speech act requires that the speaker perform the assertion, request, and so on sincerely, that is, that he/she be in the “psychological state” required by the speech act: so if the speaker is stating a fact, he/she must believe it is true, if they are requesting something, they must want it, and so on.
Degree of strength of the sincerity conditions: Much like the illocutionary point can occur with different strengths, so can the sincerity conditions. As Searle and Vanderveken (1985) put it, one can make a request (“ask”), but if the speaker “begs, beseeches, or implores” (p. 19), then they are expressing a stronger desire than a request.
Felicity Conditions: An Analysis of the Speech Act of Promising
Searle provides a worked out example of the kinds of constitutive rules that define a prototypical, idealized speech act, using the example of “promise.” The analysis is painstaking, but worth considering in detail, if one wants to understand how speech acts actually work. It consists of several felicity conditions, starting with the assumption that the speaker is making the promise to the hearer:
1 Normal input/output conditions. Output is generally speaking, and input is hearing, but appropriate changes can be made for writing, sign language, and so on. This is a very broad category, which includes that both speaker and hearer are capable of and competent to speak the language (e.g., they are not sick, drunk, or otherwise impaired), that they are “seriously” and “literally” engaged in speaking. This stipulation rules out not only “parasitic” (1969, p. 57) uses of language, such as “play acting, teaching a language, reciting poems, practicing pronunciation” (1969, p. 57n1) but also joke telling (1969, p. 57) and nonliteral uses, such as metaphor, irony, and sarcasm.
2 The speaker expresses a proposition p. As we saw, this allows the analysis to decouple the illocutionary force (the promising) from the locutionary aspect (the proposition, or to put it differently, what gets promised in the act of promising). We may add that if the speaker did not express a proposition, the act of promising would be very strange, as witnessed by the following imaginary conversation:(13) A: I promise.B: What?A: Nothing, I am just promising.
3 The promise must regard a future act performed by the speaker. One cannot sincerely promise to do something one has already done, for example. Nor can one promise someone else’s action (although one can promise that one will make someone else do something, but then the promise is that the speaker will coerce the other party). To put it differently, one can only commit one’s will, not someone else’s. Searle stresses too that the future act may be a non-act (as in promising not to do something).
4 The promised act must be viewed positively by the hearer and the speaker must share this belief. If the hearer believes that the promised act is to be viewed negatively, then the promise is not a promise but a threat.
5 The speaker was not going to perform the act independently of the promise. One cannot sincerely promise to go to work the next day, if one was going to do that anyway. In fact, saying I promise to go to work tomorrow presupposes that there is at least a possibility that one may not go to work the next day.
6 The speaker intends to perform the act promised. According to Searle, the distinction between sincere and insincere promises lies in the fact that the speaker does or does not intend to perform the action. Searle also notes that the sincere intention to perform an act presupposes one thinks it is feasible to do so.
7 The speaker intends to incur into the obligation to perform the act promised.
What happens if S produces a speech act but violates one of the aforementioned felicity conditions? We are then faced with a “defective” performance of a speech act (Searle, 1969, p. 54). What does it mean that there was a defective performance? The act was still performed, but one of the felicity conditions is not satisfied. Searle notes that this does not destroy the speech act entirely: if one promises to sing a song, while in fact not intending to do so, they have still performed a speech act of promising, only it was an invalid one. Searle notes that this is directly related to Austin’s concept of infelicity. We will return to this in Chapters 9 and 10.
3.1.5 Indirect Speech Acts
The analysis of speech acts discussed earlier has a significant gap: it is possible to perform a given speech act by performing a different one instead. Recall that speech acts need not be linguistic, so it should not surprise us to find that one can perform more than one speech act at a time. Searle explains this as an “indirect speech act.” Consider the simple example:
(14) Can you pass the salt?
literally this is a question concerning the capacity of H to perform an action (passing the salt). However, the illocutionary force of the utterance is that of a request to pass the salt. Simplifying a little we have two paraphrases for (14) depending whether we look at the conventional meaning (sentence) or at the meaning in the situation (utterance).
(15) Are you able to pass the salt? (sentence force = question)
(16) Please pass the salt. (utterance force = request)
Searle argues that
