# Introduction speech act study is essentially immersed in pragmatics. The major concerns of pragmatics include: speech acts (when we speak, we perform various actions with our words); presuppositions (in communicative events, things which participants take for granted are said to be presuppositions about the context); intentions (these are participants' communicative goals); implicatures (implied issues in an utterance); contexts (the relevant aspects of the physical or social setting of an utterance or discourse); inferences (making logical conclusions from available contextual data); non-verbal communication (gestures, dressing and movements). These pragmatic concepts are useful in this linguistic appraisal of Austinian postulations as they anchor my investigation of "speech acts around the clause". Hymes (1972) observes "that language differs in terms of culture, structure and use. # a) Austinian Postulations Austin's work, How to Do Things with Words, is a remarkable achievement in the study of speech acts in particular and in the literature of pragmatics in general. See Acheoah (2013) for more insights on this theory. For the purpose of this study, I pay close attention to Austin's distinction between "the act of doing x" or "achieving x" and "the act of attempting to do x". My argument will rely on certain speech actcarrying sentences, and this makes it necessary to briefly examine Austin's speech act taxonomy. Austin's taxonomy has no doubt influenced posthumous speech act taxonomies. The classification of speech act is intractable and critical in the literature of pragmatics. I strongly believe that feasible categorization of illocutionary forces is a prerequisite for the investigation of illocutionary acts. However, it has been difficult to evolve a workable taxonomy in this field of language study, as several scholarly attempts have their loopholes. Adegbija (1982) cites that these attempts include the pioneering ones by Austin (1962),Ohmann (1972), Searle (1973, revised in Searle, 1979), Franser (1974), Campbell (1975), Katz (1977), McCawley (1977), Hancher (1979), Bach and Harnish (1979) as well as Ballmer and Brennenstuhl (1981). Austin attempts a general preliminary classification (cf. 1962:150) which produced five speech act categories: Verdictives, Exercitives, Commissives, Behabitives and Expositives. He notes "that Verdictives is typified by the giving of a verdict by a jury, arbitrator, or umpire. They may be an estimate, reckoning, or appraisal" (p.153). Examples include "acquit", "convict", "reckon", "diagnose", and "analyze". Exercitives contains acts which involve "the exercising of powers, rights, or influence" (p. 151). Examples are "appointing", "advising", "warning" and "ordering". Commissives, which is Austin's third class, is characterized by promising or undertaking. Austin submits "that the whole point of Commissives is to commit the speaker to a certain course of action" (p. 157). Examples include "promise", "undertake", "contract", "covenant", and so on. Behabitives, he posits, concerns attitudes and social behaviors. They include "the notion of reaction to other people's behaviors and fortunes and of attitudes and expressions of attitudes to someone else's past conduct or imminent conduct" (p.160). Verbs in this A category include "apologize", "thank", "condole" and "sympathize". Expositives, Austin's final class, is that which "makes plain how our utterances fit into the course of an argument ?" (p.152). Examples of verbs in this category are "reply", "argue", "concede" and "illustrate". I present (i) and (ii) which are postulations in Austin (ibid.) for a clause structure investigative discourse: 1. Performing a speech act involves "doing x" or "attempting to do x", and there is perlocutionary object, uptake and sequel in the act; 2. The difference between performatives and constatives is in the areas of "doing" and "saying". # II. Theoretical Framework I hinge on the System of Mood, the Abstract Performative Hypothesis (cf. Saddock 1974), the Emergent Context and the Illocutionary Frames Principle (cf. Acheoah 2011) to give this investigation a sound theoretical base, and make it a more illuminating discourse. a) The System of Mood See Osisanwo (2003) for more insights on the system of mood in the English sentence. The system of mood, among other things, accounts for the choices made by the speaker with regard to the presence or absence of a subject in a linguistic stretch; where a subject is present, whether it is positioned before or within the predicator; where the subject is absent, whether or not the speaker is one of the participants of the action in the speech act. Consider: (a1) Ada writes (indicative mood with present subject in a statement); (a2) Stand (Imperative mood without subject in a command/order). Allan (1986) submits "that only explicit performative verbs occur in utterances using indicative mood. Utterance act has to do with who carries out the action. Examples: (a3) Get out! (Jussive that is when the listener is the performer); (a4) Let him come here! (Non-jussive that is when neither the speaker nor the listener is the performer). The jussive mood can include the speaker or exclude him e.g.: (a5) Go out! (Jussive-exclusive); (a6) Let us go out! (Jussive-inclusive). I contend through IFP, that even the non-jussive imperative can be used in such a way that the speaker becomes the performer that is, by using an utterance in the frame of "Talking about doing x" as an illocutionary strategy to request something from the addressee. The connection between the system of mood and illocutionary act is not explained in Austin (ibid.); Questions and Requestives (see Bach I do not want to expatiate on the system of mood in this paper, so I shall proceed to examine Saddock's linguistic theory. b) The Abstract Performative Hypothesis Saddock (1974) contends "that explicit performatives make it clear that illocutionary forces cannot be ruled out of Speech Act Theories" (ibid. p.12). He proposes the Abstract Performative Analysis which states "that in the deep structure semantic representations of certain sentences, the subject refers to the speaker of the sentence, the indirect object refers to the addressee and illocutionary force is that part of the meaning of a sentence which corresponds to the highest clause in its semantic representation". He contends that sentential ambiguity is informed by illocutionary force, and that a single sentence can be a conjunction of two or more clauses, each with its illocutionary force; I explore the IFP to explain that not all illocutionary forces in clause constituents impinge on meaning, implicatures and perlocutionary sequel. c) The Illocutionary Frames Principle (IFP) IFP presents my break-away position in the discussion of participant-concept in pragmatics in general and Austin's. Theory in particular. I opine through the devised theoretical concept, IFP, that participants' utterance acts can be understood in terms of whether they are "performers" or "conveyers" of the illocutionary acts therein. I observe that discourse often begins with a speaker-hearer based context (context of speech). This facilitates the inferential process and generation of implicatures and presuppositions. But there are sometimes Emergent contexts subsumed in an ongoing discourse. The arrows in the diagram below indicate the interaction between the context of speech and the Emergent Context; in its speaker-hearer based capacity, the "context of speech" is a macro (broad) context whereas the Emergent Context is a micro context in a given discourse. To show that an Emergent Context hinders perlocutionary sequel, I have used minus signs. Thus, the plus signs show the points where perlocutionary sequel occurs; when no context is emergent in the context of speech or when the Emergent Context has become shared knowledge to the participants of discourse. The triangle which represents the Emergent Context is drawn upside down to communicate the unexpected nature of an Emergent Context in an on-going discourse; we do not expect an equilqteral triangle to be upside down. # f) Critical Perspectives on Austinian Postulations Austin's idea of a perlocutionary sequel as in (i) may not operate when a Directive such as "Student, stay here!" is performed with the expected felicity conditions; a Lecturer utters it to a student in a lecture-room. My view in this theoretical attempt is to state that the hearerbased level of an illocutionary act does not yield a perlocutionary sequel until the speaker (Lecturer) is made to know why it is logical to disobey his supposed felicitous Directive. A micro context, the Emergent Context is a constituent of the context of speech. It is hidden because none of the participants envisaged it. This concept does not hold when there is no existing discourse. It is simply an attempt to capture superimposed contextual nuances in discourse. Whenever there is an Emergent Context, participants' world knowledge and mutual contextual beliefs are on the alert. These discourse tools facilitate the generation of implicatures in Emergent Contexts. For example, since the student disobeys his lecturer's Directive due to the Emergent Context, the perlocutionary effect of the student's action on this Lecturer (after the Lecturer had known that the student's reason for disobeying his directive is reasonable) can neither be "disgrace" nor "annoyance". # Hearer-based Speaker-hearer based I `have maintained that "Doing x" (performing an illocutionary act) has to be understood to have propositional contents that should be clear to hearers. But there are sentences that are too problematic for Austinian stance with regards uptake, because of their in-built multiple interpretive potentials (numerous layers of meaning). Different layers of meaning can be attributed to S's utterance by H. This means that even the literal meaning of utterances cannot take care of Consider: 1. Ade is in the hospital; 2. Ade is in the house; 3. I went to the toilet and forced myself; 4. I went to the market and forced myself. S: Do you have toilet here? H: The nearest toilet here is in the market, and it is a public one. S: Let me hurry there. Even if it is dirty, I shall force myself. H: How far? (after some minutes that S was back). S: I went to the toilet and forced myself. H: Poor you! I align with Saddock's submission "that a clear distinction between performatives and constatives proves difficult to establish". There are explicit performative as argued by Saddock (ibid.) which shows that a verb used in a certain way makes explicit the action being performed. In the sentence, "I insist that snow is not white", the same act can be performed implicitly if the sentence is reframed as "Snow is not white" (where felicity and truth/falsity are predicated). There is the common knowledge in pragmatics, that an encoder can use constatives as performatives (to perform actions rather than their usual truth/falsity attributes assigned to them in Austin's theoretical framework). I assign this role to "Talking about doing x" relying on the devised concept, Illocutionary Frames Principle (IFP). For example, a child can persuade his mother to buy him a wrist-watch by simply "talking about how his friend's mother bought the friend a wrist-watch"; he utters the utterance, expects the mother to understand it as an indirect Requestive different from "Doing x"; in "Talking about doing x" the child has used a constative as a performative so that both a performative and a constative do not differ in "doing and saying" as Austin posits. I also note that an encoder can request and get something from the decoder by merely making a participant who though is in the setting, is not the speaker's interlocutor, hear the utterance which conveys the Requestive illocutionary act. In natural illocutionary forces, whereas mutual contextual beliefs Consider: whereas mutual contextual beliefs and world knowledge can do so. If H has mutual contextual knowledge with S, (4)...becomes meaningful, for example: speech situations, there are cases where a speaker does not speak directly. In (1), the speaker means "Ade is there as a patient or as a visitor of a patient". In (2), we are not made to attach any adverbial of reason to the sentence, because of its clarity.Figure 2 shows the different layers of meaning for (1) -( 4). Apart from processing (4), H can pretend to be addressing. Pretends to be addressing his interlocutor whereas he is addressing another hearer in the context of speech and situation. I therefore propose the concept, H2 (Hearer2), in the literature of pragmatics. The concept refers to a speaker's "targeted-hearer" rather than his interlocutor. I use the concept to argue "that there are other acts performed in discourse, besides "Doing x" "myself". In (3), it is implied that "forced myself" means "struggling to pass out waste product (defecate or urinate)". But ( 4) is meaningless, because S needs to process the speech if H does not share with him, background knowledge that facilitates understanding. Figure 2: It is clear that "Doing x" means "Doing x unconditionally". For example, if a speaker tells the hearer, "I will give you some money" the speaker promises the hearer unconditionally, and this is the case when a marker of the conditional clause, such as "if", is not introduced into the sentence. In other words, when the markers of other adverbial clauses e.g. the adverbial clause of reason (because) concession (although), and so on, are the initiators of the subordinate clause, "Doing x" counts as "Doing x". But this is not the case when the initiator of the subordinate clause is a marker of the conditional clause (unless, if, among others). I examine the exchange below: (a17) Son: I passed the exam. (a18) Dad: Expect N2000 from me tomorrow (promising unconditionally). The second unit in this conversation is informed by the first. Thus, there is a covert marker of the adverb of reason in Dad's utterance; that is, Dad's reason for promising Son is that Son passed his exam. In (a18), the act is performed whether or not the reason for it is stated. However, "Doing x" could occur in different types of clauses (paraphrases): (a19) Expect N2000 from me tomorrow for passing the exam; (a20) I am promising you N2000 for passing the exam; (a21) I am to give you N2000 for passing the exam; (a22) You are entitled to N2000 for passing the exam; (a23) N2000 is yours for passing the exam. IFP explains that a given speech act can be conveyed or performed with or without the use of the conventional operative words such as the use of the verb "order" or "command" in a sentence whose communicative function is "command", the use of the verb "state" to make a statement or the use of the verb "promise" in a sentence which promises. Therefore, In (a24), the speaker uses "Doing x" as a reference or topic. This can be illustrated using the adjacency pairs below: (a24) Omone: I passed the exam. (a25) Dad: Why telling me? I was not the one, but Mum, who promised you, "Expect #2000 from me tomorrow for passing the exam." Dad is "Talking about doing x" (talking about an act of promise uttered by Mum) rather than promising Omone. "Talking about doing x" occurs in a direct (quoted) or an indirect clause. # UTTERANCE The implication of my arguments for speech act theories in general, is that in (a25), "Mum", not "Dad", performs "the act of promise". IFP aligns with Sadock's submission 'that the clause in which an NP occurs, determines whether or not acts are performed by the NP. I observe that (a25) is synonymous with (a26) in which "so" replaces "Expect #2000 from me for passing the exam": (a26) It was not me but Otun who said so Referentialism postulates that indexicals, names and demonstratives determine what is said, rather than other descriptive words used in saying. IFP is germane to this claim. Illocutionary contents in declarative clauses (Austin's famous examples in the discussion of felicity conditions for acts include declaratives) that are in "conveyer-clauses" neither concern felicity nor infelicity conditions since the speaker is quoting another person's declarative. If a student says to a young man and woman, "I was there when the leader said, 'As a Priest, I proclaim both of you husband and wife'," the people at which the Priest's quoted declarative is directed, cannot be joined as husband and wife through the "direct, declarative speech act clause". To join them as husband and wife, the utterance, "A priest, I declare you husband and wife" (all things being equal) will yield perlocutionary sequel of making the "world" to match the Priest's "words" (see Searle 1969 for insights on "direction of fit"). The "performer" of an act may not be a "participant" but a "referent" in the on-going communication whereas the "conveyer" is always a participant. In the sentence, "I was there when the leader said, 'As a Priest I declare both of you husband and wife' " the conveyer (the student) is a "participatory participant" whereas the performer (the Priest) is a "sentential participant" In conveying another person's act, the conveyer is "Talking about doing x" (talking about another person's promising, ordering, informing, as the case may be). The conveyer may present the referent's act in direct or indirect speeches. Thus, I propose the notions, "conveyer of speech acts" and "performer of speech acts", using IFP as a theoretical framework, to argue that in the referential clause, conventional implicatures or illocutionary contents do not concern sentential participants (nouns or indexical) since they are mentioned in referential clauses which may be quoted or not; thus, just as the clause that encloses the illocutionary content of a sentence, the referential clause has its subject, and may also have an object. Indeed part of the argument IFP presents is that the idea of "uptake" contained in (i) may not operate in discourse as "Talking about doing x" may not be understood by a decoder as his encoder's indirect illocutionary strategy. For instance, it takes a father to know his son for "always being indirect in the use of illocutionary act (idiosyncrasy), before the father can generate uptake as expected by the son when the son is "Talking about doing x" to achieve an illocutionary goal. On the issue of perlocutionary object, I note that the son can use an act of Promise to persuade or an act of Greeting to warn. The fact remains that the common pre-knowledge which the decoder has makes it easy for him to identify the illocutionary contents that are actually speaker-based. If I use the utterance "Hi!" to warn my little baby (I am strongly indebted to Adegbija 1982 in the use of this example), and achieve my illocutionary goal, can I say there was uptake on the part of the baby or perlocutionary object on my part? In Austin's view, "uptake" has to do with how the hearer understands a particular speech act performed in a given context, whereas perlocutionary object has to do with using the formal properties or linguistic conventions of natural languages to achieve illocutionary acts. For example, it negates linguistic convention, for a speaker to use "Hi" to warn his interlocutor rather than using it as a Greeting. All this boils back to the fact that the encoder of "Hi" relies on world knowledge in the selection of communication elements. IFP is not evolved to state the conditions for perlocutionary acts, but to state the various forms uptake has in communication. If a decoder understands that the encoder is not insulting, promising, commanding, informing; but merely talking about these acts, then implicatures and perlocutionary sequel become predictable. Figure 3: "A to do x", "T about Doing x" and "Doing x c" represent "Attempting to do x", "Talking about doing x" and Doing x conditionally" respectively. Frame 1 of Figure 3 is a cross-like shape because other illocutionary frames are aspects of it. I use circular caps for Frames 2-4 because they are context-enclosed choices in their indirect speech act potency. The vertical arrows penetrating each circular cap and the horizontal ones beside each illocutionary act type show that each of the frames is interpreted accordingly by participants; their literal and non-literal propositional contents are of speaker-hearer knowledge. The participants understand frames 1-4, that is, there is "uptake" with regards the frame of each of the illocutionary acts; the hearer understands an utterance in different frames: "Doing x (which is essentially doing x unconditionally)", "Attempting to do x", "Talking about doing x" or "doing x conditionally." I have used the upward arrows in Frame 1 because "Doing x" is clearly understood by decoders as a dominant non-literal illocutionary strategy in every day discourse. To create a difference between a superordinate illocutionary frame, which Frame 1 represents, I choose to place an "headless" arrow beside it. # III. # Results Thus, based on the clause in which a performative formula occurs, it may either be "doing or saying x", and this negates Austin's claim in (ii). In other words, when a constative is used as an indirect speech act in the frame of "Talking about doing x" it can be categorized as being in the domain of "doing" not "saying" (which is the dominant domain of constatives). The IFP therefore shows that there is indeed some forms of clause-structure patterning and selection that conveys speakers' illocutionary goals and the propositional contents of sentences. An encoder may choose a suitable illocutionary frame such as "Doing x conditionally", expecting his decoder to interpret the utterance alongside the context to be able to focus on speaker's emphatic linguistic stretch. The potency of IFP theory is clear when one considers the fact that in natural languages, speakers do not always speak directly. Although it takes the illocutionary act potential for a sentence to "mean", such a meaning is bedeviled The clause-structure investigation established in this study, declares that the speaker-meaning remains clear when the same illocutionary verb is positioned in different parts of a sentence. # IV. # Discussion I have engaged a critical overview of Austin's speech act theory basically from a clause-structure perspective. The theory defines "appropriateness" in the use of words or speech acts to do things in terms of how speakers abide by the norms of the language (linguistic acceptability). It is of semantic relevance, to investigate the relationships which illocutionary acts have with the grammatical agencies that convey them. This will help ascertain whether or not or better still, the extent at which structural or grammatical patterns have to comply with illocutionary act performance. After an extensive study of the popular taxonomies of illocutionary acts in the literature of pragmatics, Saddock submits that arbitrary criteria and irregularities characterize illocutionary act classification. I contend that the IFP explains part of the weaknesses of the Truth Conditional Theory. For example, the sentence, "The woman who was never pregnant, gave birth to a bouncing baby boy" becomes "logical" if said in a "conveyer clause" in which Andrew reports Phil's statement in the frame of "Talking about doing x".World knowledge, besides linguistic competence, helps hearers to interpret illocutionary acts as either "conveying illocutionary forces" or "performing same" in the context of speech; Holdcroft (1978:20) posits "that the whole idea of a perlocutionary act is of an act which when performed by saying something can be redescribed as the performance of an illocutionary act with certain consequences". One of the reasons why many illocutionary acts do not have consequences in certain speech situations is that they are understood by hearers as not being in the performative clause structure. I observe that in natural languages, sentences are often expanded to generate different clause structures, of which not all the clauses have potent illocutionary acts that seriously affect, concern, implicate or engage the on-going discourse and the participants therein. Sperber and Wilson (1988) contend "that expansions and completions are not implicatures, but are explicit contents of utterances". In addition, Bach and Harnish (1979: 219-28) note that explanations can be given why certain locutions do not fit into the category of "what is said"; such locutions abound in constructions with which they have syntactic but not semantic relations. Therefore, in this study I have used linguistic context-sensitive sentences (for analysis) which make easy, coherent and clear presentation of arguments. The trio: syntax, semantics and pragmatics have to be properly understood in order to comprehend how language and speech acts operate; an act of promise performed in the frame of "Talking about doing x (talking about someone else's promising)" does not make a hearer expect something (the object) from the speaker. Waismann (1951) notes that predication mostly requires a context due to the open texture of most empirical concepts. In spite of the fact that I mainly present linguistic arguments towards the critique of Austinian theoretical positions, I note that external factors (world knowledge, presuppositions and mutual contextual beliefs) influence the interpretation of meaning within clause structures, and the consequences (sequel) of linguistic elements on the participants of discourse (which are also beyond the sentence) can be determined by a speaker's placement of speech act verbs in the clauses of a sentence. David Harrah, cited in Savas (1994:375) cites "that most speech acts seem to be focused and directed. They are intended as coming from the agent and going to the receivers or audience. They are intended to have a certain point, and they are intended to be construed as having a certain point"; this claim captures Austinian postulation in (i) "that performing a speech act involves a perlocutionary object, an uptake and a sequel". I posit that a Directive performed in an illocutionary frame other than that of "Doing x" will not yield a sequel unless the encoder uses it as an indirect illocutionary strategy. David Harrah explains that speech acts that are focused or directed at receivers are said to be "vectored". Vectoring makes the encoder's intentions known to the decoder. I rely more on statements, questions and orders in the presentation of this linguistic critique, noting "that most languages have non-propositional distinctions among at least three basic types, clustering around the central features of statement making, question asking and order giving" (Saddock and Zwicky 1985). The clause-structure approach to the study of meaning and illocutionary act therefore has significant implications on speech act theory in modern perspectives. V. # Conclusion Sentences have their in-built meanings (normative or linguistic meanings) despite the possibility of speaker-meanings. Levinson (1983) argues that it is a tremendous thing for hearers to work out speakers' intentions in uttering certain utterances, bearing in mind the dynamics of contexts. In a similar vein, Bronislaw and Archibald (2004) opine that there are usually constraints which inform the different components of speech. Thus, clause structure patterning is neither arbitrary nor insignificant. He corroborates other scholars who hold the view that certain linguistic forms do not have to correlate with certain illocutionary forces. The different illocutionary frames in IFP explain that a single illocutionary act can be performed in different frames. However, a good mastery of linguistic and extralinguistic variables enables participants of discourse to use different frames of a single speech act to achieve illocutionary goals. ![d) The Emergent ContextThe Illocutionary Frames Principle (IFP) and the Austinian Postulations: A Clause-Structure Investigative DiscourseGlobal Journal of Human Social ScienceVolume XIII Issue XIII Version I](image-2.png "") © 2013 Global Journals Inc. (US) © 2013 Global Journals Inc. (US) © 2013 Global Journals Inc. (US) * A Pragmatic Analysis of Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Ola Rotimi's Hopes of the Living Dead JEAcheoah 2011 PhD Dissertation. 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