Speech Act Theory And Significance Of Concept Study

The theory of speech act, first proposed by Austin, and developedfurther by Searle, mainly takes langue as an act and attaches greatimportance on pragmatic elements as participator's intent as well ascontext, and now it has become the universal accepted theory in the field ofphilosophy and linguistics. According to it, what people speak is people dosomething. So we can state an affair, ask a question, make an order or arequirement by means of using language. Speech act can be divided intotwo types: Speech act that the meaning of what person intent is identical toliteral meaning is direct and the indirect one refers to the fact thatachieving one act by means of another Speech act. So if we can notunderstand sub audition of indirect Speech act correctly, intercommunicationcan not accomplished successfully, neither.On the basis of brief introduction on Speech act, the paper will focusdiscussion on meaning theory of Searle's Speech act. Meaning theory ofSearle's Speech act developed a school of his own, which takes one act ofspeech as basic unit of meaning, and he emphasized speaker's intentmeaning but not simply the literal meaning. What's more, he discussedquestions of reference and introduced three principles: principle ofexistence, principle of identity, and principle of identification, andanalyzed conditions of reference on the basis of the discussion.The paper analyzes Speech act in the last part, which follows fromthree steps. The paper first comments on the three categories of speechacts theory, and analyzes the relations between locutionary acts andmeaning expressed by langue,illocutionary acts and attitude ofproposition,perloctionary acts and effect of proposition, and thenexpatiates influence to logic. It expanded the field of phraseology in logic, and made it possible for logic to break away the traditional logic frame thatblindly studies the value of proposition. And indirect Speech act providedreference for logic reasoning of natural language. The paper, in the end,analyzes the relation between speech act and logic.