Cover not available

In:The Functional Perspective on Language and Discourse: Applications and implications
Edited by María de los Ángeles Gómez González, Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco Gonzálvez-García and Angela Downing
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 247] 2014
► pp. 243–260

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
authorization required

Searle and Sinclair on communicative acts

A sketch of a research problem

 | University of Trier, Germany
Published online: 16 May 2014
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.247.13stu
John Searle and John Sinclair have worked in very different academic traditions: analytic philosophy and empirical linguistics. Nevertheless, although they work with very different methodological and theoretical assumptions, they both tackle one of the deepest questions in the philosophy of language – the nature of units of meaning – and there are similarities in their models of communicative acts – speech acts and extended lexical units. It is therefore productive to study in how far the two approaches are complementary, and whether their different strengths can be combined. I will give brief examples of how Searle’s model could be strengthened by grounding it in empirical textual and ethnographic data, and therefore – conversely – how Sinclair’s model could be strengthened by giving it a social rationale.
References (30)
References
Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words . Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blackburn, Simon. 2010. “Review of John Searle Making the Social World. New Republic On-line Review .” [URL]. [Last accessed January 2012.]Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Channell, Joanna. 2000. “Corpus-based Analysis of Evaluative Lexis.” In Evaluation in Text , ed. by Susan Hunston and Geoffrey Thompson, 38–55. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Francis, Gill. 1993. “A Corpus-driven Approach to Grammar.” In Text and Technology , ed. by Mona Baker, Gill Francis and Elena Tognini-Bonelli, 137–156. Amsterdam: John ­Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gazdar, Gerald. 1979. Pragmatics . New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pawley, Andrew and Frances H. Syder. 1983. “Two Puzzles for Linguistic Theory.” In Language and Communication , ed. by Jack C. Richards and Richard W. Schmidt, 191–226. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Popper, Karl R. 1994. The Myth of the Framework . London. Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Searle, John R. 1965. “What Is a Speech Act?” In Philosophy in America , ed. by Max Black, 221–239. London: Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1969. Speech Acts . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1975a. “Indirect Speech Acts.” In Syntax and Semantics, Vol 3: Speech Acts , ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 59–82. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1975b. “A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts.” In Language, Mind and Knowledge , ed. by Keith Gunderson, 344–369. Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press. [Republished in several other places.]Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1995. The Construction of Social Reality . London: Allen Lane.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2005. “What Is an Institution?”. Available online at: [URL]. [URL]
. 2010a. The Making of the Social World . Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010b. “Is Just Thinking Enough?” New York Review of Books , 11. November 2010.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. (n.d.) “Interview with John Searle by Julian Moore.” [URL]. [Last accessed January 2012.]
Sinclair, John McH. 1966. “Indescribable English.” Summary in John McH. Sinclair and R. ­Malcolm Coulthard. 1975. Towards an Analysis of Discourse , 151. London: Oxford ­University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation . Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1996. “The Search for Units of Meaning. ” Textus 9 (1): 75–106.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1998. “The Lexical Item.” In Contrastive Lexical Semantics , ed. by Edda Weigand, 1–24. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2004. Trust the Text . London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2005. “The Phrase, the Whole Phrase and Nothing but the Phrase.” Plenary lecture, Phraseology 2005, Louvain-la-Neuve, October 2005.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2007. “Introduction.” In Michael Hoey, Michaela Mahlberg, Michael Stubbs and Wolfgang Teubert. Text, Discourse and Corpora , 1–5. London: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2008. “Borrowed Ideas.” In Language, People, Numbers , ed. by Andrea ­Gerbig, and Oliver Mason, 21–42. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sinclair, John McH. and R. Malcolm Coulthard. 1975. Towards an Analysis of Discourse . London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sinclair, John McH., Susan Jones and Robert Daley, 1970/2004. English Collocation Studies. The OSTI Report , ed. by Ramesh Krishnamurthy. London: Continuum. [Original mimeo report 1970, edited version published 2004.]Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stubbs, Michael. 2007. “Quantitative Data on Multi-word Sequences in English: The Case of the Word World.”In Michael Hoey, Michaela Mahlberg, Michael Stubbs and Wolfgang Teubert. Text, Discourse and Corpora , 163–189. London: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2009. “The Search for Units of Meaning: Sinclair on Empirical Semantics. ” Applied Linguistics 30 (1): 115–137. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2013. “Sequence and Order: The Neo-Firthian Tradition of Corpus Semantics.” In Corpus Perspectives on Patterns of Lexis , ed. by H. Hasselgård, J. Ebeling and S. Oksefjell, 13–33. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Su, Hang & Naixing Wei
2018. “I’m really sorry about what I said”. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) 28:3 ► pp. 439 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue