Speech act theory

Marina Sbisà
University of Trieste
Table of contents

Many problems that we now consider as proper to speech act theory have already been formulated or at least hinted at on other occasions during the history of Western philosophy and linguistics. Philosophers have been concerned with the relation between the meaning of words, the expression of a proposition, and the act of assertion. Aristotle distinguished between the meaning of words and the assertiveness of declarative sentences (Peri Hermēneias [On interpretation]16b: 26–30). Philosophers of language, rhetoricians, and linguists have been aware of the variety of uses or discourse which roughly corresponded to kinds of speech acts; the theory of language of the Stoics, which was to become very influential for the development of grammatical studies, distinguished judgements, which alone are true or false, from wh questions, polar questions, imperatives, and expressions of wish, correlating their function with their grammatical form.

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