Speech Acts and Sentential Mood

Speaking is a form of doing. When a person makes an utterance, they perform an action, and the study of these actions is a well-developed area of pragmatics. Speech acts were popularized by Searle, while the related notions of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts come from Austin. These concepts have been taken up to some degree within biblical studies, but within linguistics it is the illocutionary act that has received the most sustained attention because it is so pervasive.

Three distinctions organize this area. A speech act is the action performed when an utterance is made: one can make a statement, ask a question, or give a command. An illocutionary act is the act the speaker intends to perform in making the utterance. And sentential mood (or force) is the prototypical act associated with a given sentence type. A declarative prototypically makes a statement, an interrogative prototypically asks a question, and an imperative prototypically gives a command.

The central insight is that the illocutionary act need not align with the sentential force of an utterance. Consider three sentences about pizza. I want pizza is a declarative that makes a statement about the speaker's desires; it is neither question nor command in form. Can you give me another slice of pizza? is an interrogative, a question about the world. Give me another slice of pizza is an imperative, a command. Each sentence type is prototypically tied to a different speech act.

Yet context can pull the intended act away from the form. In the right situation, I want pizza can be intended as a request meaning "give me a piece of pizza," even though its form is a statement. Similarly, Can you give me another slice of pizza? is literally a question about ability, but in ordinary use it functions as a polite command. Such misalignments between form and intention occur constantly, once one begins to notice them, and tracing how sentence types interface with intended acts is one of the more interesting aspects of pragmatic analysis.

This gap creates a particular challenge for interpreting written texts. In a text, the sentence type is normally recoverable, since mood is marked on the verb or indicated syntactically: an interpreter can usually identify a declarative, interrogative, or imperative. What is far less certain is the illocutionary act, that is, what the author intended to accomplish with that form. Reconstructing the intended act from the available form, without the situational cues present in live conversation, is where interpretation becomes both difficult and rewarding. Recognizing that form and intention can diverge is the first step toward not mistaking the prototypical act of a sentence for the act its author actually meant to perform.