DOCUMENT RESUME

ED 246 415 CS 208 112

AUTHOR Bliss, Carolyn

TITLE Writing as Action: Using Speech Act Theory in the
Composition Classroom.
PUB DATE Oct 83
NOTE 37p.; Paper presented at the Annual Fill Conference
of the Virginia Association of Teachers of English
(14th, Arlington, VA, October 7-9, 1983).
PUB TYPE Speeches/Conference Papers (150) -- Guides -
Classroom Use - Guides (For Teachers) (052)

EDRS PRICE MF01/PCO2 Plus Postage.

DESCRIPTORS Higher Education; *Language Usage; Learning Theories;
Persuasive Discourse; Rhetoric; *Speech Acts; *Speech
Communication; *Student Teacher Relationship; Writing
Improvement; *Writing Instruction
IDENTIFIERS *Jargon

ABSTRACT
Speech act theory jargon has several advantages over
the traditional composition jargon. First, it is new and therefore
potentially exciting. Its newness means that all students have an
equal chance at it and need not feel that because they failed to
understand a term presented in high school, that notion is forever
lost to them. Second, jargon is fun. It,creates an in-group of the
informed, a comfortable place to be, especially for a student writer.
A final advantage is that speech act theory terms can be clearly
defined and demonstrated in ways the student understands. Speech act
theory begins to systemize the exploration of the rhetorical
transaction between speaker and hearer; it makes this transaction
more intelligble and, t:erefore, more teachable. (CRN)

***************************************************0*******************
* Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made *

* from the original document. *

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WRITING AS ACTION:

.
*USING SPEECH ACT THEORY IN THE COMPOSITION CLASSROOM

A paper presented at the

Fourteenth Annual Fall Conference of the Virginia Association

of Teachers of English

("NJ Arlington, Virginia, October 7-9, 1983

C.M
Li
Carolyn Bliss

Radford University

Mere was a,joke making the rounds at Radford University last year,

one of those jokes which depend for their humor on dramatizing dunderheade,a

helplessness. The joke goes like this: "Did you hear about the guy who

locked his keys in his car? Took him five hours to pry the car open and

get the rest of his family out." The student who told me this joke was

especi,ally amused by the mental image it evoked for him. "Can't you just

see them?" he chuckled, "the wife and kids pounding On the windows and

screaming to get out?"

Certainly, slIch helplessness is funny, but sore of its analogues are

less amusing. In fact, I think the very student who told this story was

caught in a similar dilemma. Like the wife and the kids in the story, that

is, he had what Chomsky called the competence he needed to complete the

task at hand. He had only to open the door. But something about the

situation he was in, something frightening or alienating, impeded that

competence, blocking its emergence as performance. As teachers of writing,

we could all report experiences paralleling that of Rcbert Zoellner:

"PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS
MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY

Carolyn Bliss

ti
TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC)."
 2

The most compelling and suggestive office interview

"happening" occurs when I read the student's utterly

opaque and impenetrable sentence or paragraph aloud

to him. "Mr. Phillips," I say, "I simply can't make head

nor tails out of this paragraph; what in the world were

you trying to say?" When I pose this question in this

situation, large numbers of students, certainly a majority,

respond with a bit of behavior which I suggest may be of

immense significance for the teaching of composition. They

open their mouths and they say the thing they were unable

to write. "Well, Dr. Zoellner," they usually begin, "all

I meant to say in-that paragraph was that . . .," and out

it comes, a sustained, articulated, rapid-fire segment of

sound-stream," usually from five to fifteen seconds duration,

which communicates to me effectively and quickly what they

"had in mind" when they produced the impenetrable paragraph

I hold in my hand. And all I had to do to elicit this

fascinating bit of behavior was to ask them to shift from

1
the scribal modality to the vocal modality.

As Ross Winterowd and Dan Slobin have argued, our students do have a

thoroughgoing understanding or their native tongue and the potential to

2
use it effectively. "The task of the 1:nguage teacher," says Winterowd,

"is to activate basic compete4nce so that it alTears in the arena of

performance." 3

Of course, not everyone agrees either that student writers possess

this theoretical global competdnce or that encouraging what Zoellner calls

 4
a "vocal-scribal reweld" can help to activate it. James Collins, for

example, has found that a relatively greater reliance on habits developed

from the use of spoken language is evident in the work of weak and

unskilled writers; and John C. Shafer cautions us that written texts,

which are normally structured as monologues, make far greater demands than
6
do the collaboratively produced dialogues of spoken discourse. Yet

Shafer, too, concludes "that a particular kind of oral language trans-

ference can help, not hurt, writing. Most students would write better if

they channeled some of the liveliness that characterizes their conversation

into their papers."7

My argument here will be that an understanding of speech act theory

and the classroom use of some of its concepts might dig the channels

Shafer hopes for between a student's vocal precision and scribal opacity.

Speech act theory has this potential because it conceives of writing and

speaking as different, but not different in kind. For speech act theorists,

the production of language in any mode is an act, or in other words, to say

is always to do.

To locate the theory, we might adopt the distinctions of Carnap and

Morris between syntactics, which studies the relationship among signs;.

semantics, whose field is the relationship of signifier to signified; and

8
pragmatics, whose fDcus is on signs as they relate to users. Within this

schema, the fr, ,ry's emphasis on speeCh as action and its corollary concern

with language in action places it squarely in the domain of pragmatics,

the linguistic domain inhabited by most of our students. Speech act

theory is concerned with what Dell Hymes has called "communicative

competence": the ability to use language purposefully and context-

9
sensitively to accomplish-the job of communicating.

4
 It arse in the 1960's largely out of the work of the philosopher
10
J. L. Austin and its development by John Searle. The work of H. P. ,Grice,

especially on implicature and the Cooperative Principle in conversation,

is also acknowledged by many speech act theorists, and for good reason.

Grice defines meaning in terms of the intention to use an utterance to

produce an effect on an audience. This concept of meaning allows a shift

from concern with sentences in isolation to concern with discourse in

context, a context which includes a speaker's purpose and intentions and

11
the impact of his speech acts.

Such a shift is implicit in the very inception of speech act theory,

whose starting point is a dissatisfaction with philosophy's traditional

approach to the sentence: one which took as standard a declarative statement

of fact, viewed it as independent of the context of other sentences, and

concentrated on identifying and describing its truth conditions -- those

circumstances which would render the sentence either true or false. In

his 1955 William James lectures at Harvard, posthumously published in 1962

as the bock How to Do Things with Words, J. L. Austin hypothesized a

quite different class of utterances: those which actually accomplish an

action rather than describing or reporting that action or anything else,

and which consequently cannot be judged as true or false. He assumed that

this lass,'which he dubbed "performatives" (p. 6), could be usefully

contrasted to the class of describers and reporters, or as Austin preferred

to call them, "constatives" (p. 3).

He first noticed that to utter a performative is to perform the action

it names. Thus to say, "I christen thee John," is to christen him John;

to say, "I bet you five dollars the Yankees will win," is to bet five
 5

dollars on the matter; and to say, "I promise you I'll go," is to make

that promise. On the other hand, to utter the constative, "He's here,"

seems to be performing no, action at all, but merely to be reporting a

state of affairs.

Austin began, tben, by suggesting a performative / constative

dichotomy in speech. But by tackling the vast grey areas of "half pui40

performatives like "I blame," wnich seem both to do and to describe (p. 79),

and by refusing, as he put it, "to bog, by logical stages, down" (p. 13),

Austin came eventually to the realization that to say is always to do, or,

in other words, that'all speech is performative. Once this proposition is

accepted, it becomes possible to analyze just what a speaker does when he

says something. Austin and John Searle after him have decided that he

normally does several things, that is, performs several related acts.

First, he produces an utterance which makes sense in terms of the

vocabulary and syntax of the language being used. This is Austin's

"locutionary act" (p. 94) and results in a meaningful utterance, one with

"sense and reference." In Searle's terms, this production actually results

from two acts: the "utterance act" which generates "words (morphemes,

sentences)" and the "propositional act" which adds to these the dimensions

of reference and predication (Speech Acts, p. 24). As Martin Steinmann,

Jr. points out, this distinction between utterance and propositional acts

is necessary to disqualify as a propositional act a statement which refers

to something. nonexistent, for example, the statement, "My uncle loves the

blonde next door;" made by someone who has no uncle and whose next door
12
neighbor is a redhead. However, for either Austin or Searle, an example

of these acts would be the production, in appropriate circumstances, of the

 6

sentence: "Mary was present." By issuing this utte-ance, the speaker

is performing the locutionary or utterance and propositional acts of

referring to Mary and predicating that she was present.

Normally, and perhaps inescapably, to perform such acts is also to

indicate or imply how they are to be taken by the hearer. Is the speaker's

utterance to be understood, for example, as a question, command, statement,

description, argument, cr expression of belief, desire, or decision? When

the speaker indicates or implies which one or several of these possibilities

best reflect his intentions in producing the utterance, he is adding to his

words the dimension which both Austin and Searle call "illocutionary

force" and thereby performing the second or "illocutionary act" (Austin,

pp. 98-100; Searle, Speech Acts, pp. 22-30).

Illocutionary fOrce may be specified by the use of what Searle calls

"illocutionary force indicating devices" (Speech Acts, p. 30), and Austin

terms "explicit performatives" (pp. 64-66). Examples are: "I argue,"

"I request," "I promise," and "I apologize." When they appear, these

devices are normally prefixed to the propositional content of the utterance

(Speech Acts, p. 30). For example, when I say, "I promise I'll be there,"

I have specified that the propositional content of my utterance ( "I'll be

there") is to be taken as having the illocutionary force of a promise. But

in an utterance like "Mary was present," the illocutionary force is implied

rather than explicit. The force here should be taken as that of a statement,

unless some other indication of illocutionary force is given, for example,

"I argue that Mary was present," "I deny that Mary was present," or even,

"I bet that Mary was present" (Austin, pp. 134-35).

On what basis do we infer illocutionary force when no verbal indicator

is present? For Searle:

 7

Illocutionary force indicating devices in English include

at least; word order, stress, intonation, contour, punctuation,

6nd/the mood of the verb 25; well ail the so-called performa-

tive verbs . Often in actual speech situations, the context

will make it clear what the illocutionary force of the utterance

is, without its being necessaryto invoke, the appropriate

explicit illocutionary force indicator.

(Speech Acts, p. 30)

Thus, for example, if a student asks a professor to do something, we can be

fairly certain that the student's utterance has the illocutionary force of

a request as opposed to a command, since the context makes the former more

appropriate.

Sometimes, and again as a result of the impact of context, illocutionary

force may inhere in a single word. Take, for example) forms of. address.
13
Drawing on Roger Brown and Marguerite Ford , Elizabeth Cross Traugott and

Mary Louise Pratt in Linguistics for Students of Literature cite the

varying effects of addressing a man named Henry Jones as "sir, Mr. Jones,

Jones, Henry, Hank, Pinky, boy, meathead, sweetheart, or dad" (pp. 226-27).
. .

I will use their example to make a slightly different point.' The illocu-

tionary force of forms like "sir" or "Mr. Jones" establishes and is

appropriate to a relationshi.) of inferior to superior or a cool relation-

ship between colleagues. The reverse relationship, that of superior to

inferior, is suggested by the illocutionary force of "boy" and perhaps

"Hank" and "Henry," while "Jones," "Henry" or "Hank" might all be used by

peers. Increasing degrees of intimacy and fondness are suggested by "Henry,"

"Hank," and "Pinky," whereas "meathead" implies contempt. The use of "dad"
or "sweetheart" suggests a certain social or familial relationship. As

context changes, forms of address and their concommitant illocutionary

force will change as well, even when the same two interlocutors are speaking.

In private or among colleagues, I address as "Earl" the professor who shares

my office, but when students are present, he is "Dr. Brown." Moreover,

even the same form of address can shift its illocutionary force as

circumstances dictate. As Traugott and Pratt put it, "The simple form

Jones could be used, among other things, to greet Jones, to get him to pay

attention, to warn him of danger, to order him to stop doing something,

or :'r) express surprise at something he just did" (p. 227). In other words,

this single word could be used to perform the illocutionary acts of

greeting,.calling for attention, warning, commanding, or expressing a

psychological state in the speaker/writer.

Thus illocutionary force is a slippery and highly context-dependent

aspect of the overall speech act. Nontheless, taxonomies of illocutionary

acts are usually attempted on the basis of illocutionary force. I have

found it most useful to draw from both Austin and Searle here, as do

Traugott and Pratt, and to offer their taxonomy as an example. It posits

the following categories of illocutionary acts:

Representatives commit the speaker to the belief that something was,

is, or will be the case. These utterances express a beli,2f in the truth

of the propositional content. Examples are "Mary was there"; "It's raining";
4,4,1

and "John Glenn will be the next Democratic,candidate for President."

Directives attempt to get the hearer/reader to do something. They

express, with varying degrees of force, the desire that something happen.

Examples are the imperative, "Open the window!" and the gentler "Would you
please open the window?" Because they seek the response of an answer,

most questions are directives.

Whereas directives try to direct the acts of others, commissives

commit the speaker/writer to a course of action. Like "I promise I'll

come," they express an intention on the speaker's part to do something.

Expressives, on the other hand, express nothing but a psychological

state in the speaker/writer. The truth of the existence of this state

is not susceptible to proof. When I say, for example, "Congratulations

on winning the race," or "I'm sorry I stepped on your toe," you have no

way of authenticating my sincerity.

In the case of declarations, a truth assessment is also useless,

because these are speech acts which make truth. That is, they bring about

a correspondence between their propositional content and reality by

creating the state of affairs they declare. Because they use language to

make something happen, and because here, the saying is undoubtedly the

doing, these are the purest examples of performatives. Sample declarations

include "I christen thee John"; "I now pronounce you man and wife"; and

"You're fired!"

A related category is the verdictive which delivers a verdict

regarding fact or value. Verdictives like "He's a nice guy" or "Bach is

better than Beethoven" display the verdictive's tendency to rank or assess.

A final sort of illocutionary act deserving mention is not itself"a

type, but rather is named for its use, a use to which any other type might

conceivably be put. This is the indirect, or what I call the double-decker

14
illocution, one which does one thing by way of another. In the literature,

the most often cited example is "Could you pass the salt?" While this
 10

about ability,
illocution has the direct illocutionary force of a question
request
it has the much more important indirect illocutionary force of a

to do something. Few of us, after all, are truly doubtful that our

addressee has the physical strength, visual acuity, moral stamina, or

whatever to pick up and pass a salt shaker. Nonetheless, there are

circumstances in which this question might function as the vehicle of its

direct illocutionary force. It would, for example, be a legitimate,

An
although highly insensitive, question to ask of a quardripiegic.
in the
illocution might also function both directly and indirectly, as
to open the door of
case of "Could you open the aoor?" asked as a request
cast. Thus, attention to
a person whose broken leg has just come our of a
distinguishing
the entire communicative context becomes imperative when
the
indirect from direct speech acts, as it also is when determining
Assessment of the speech act
illocutionary force of any illocution.
to lessen the
situation in its widest possible sense is the only way
is prone.
ambiguity to which illocutionary force determination
Is "We find the
Further ambiguities invade the taxonomy proper.
It certainly delivers
defendant not guilty" a Nierdictive or a declaration?
something happen: because of
a finding, but at the same time, it makes
And what of such illocutions as
this s,Deech act a defendant is acquitted.
liveth." Like
"I hope she'll be there" or "I know that my Redeemer
something being the case,
representatives, these acts commit the speaker to
unverifiable, they would also
but since the hope and the knowledge are

seem.to be expressives. OtherexampleS of taxonomic crossover will spring

then,
readily to mind. The purpose of presenting this classification,
 11

is less to assure you that every illocution will fit neatly into one of

its cascegories than to provide an indication of the range and uses of

illocutionary force.

"Use" is the key term here. For all these illocutions are designed

for use, that is, to have some pragmatic impact or effect upon the

'.ealer/reader. The notion of impact brings us to the final dimension of

the speech act: the perlocutionary act which produces perlocutionary effect.

As will be clear by now, speech act theory focuses on the speaker/

writer's intentions; he intends his act to have a certain propositional

content, delivered with a certain illocutionary force and to be so under-

stood. If It is so understood, the speaker/writer has achieved what Austin

called "uptake" (pp. 11E-117). Suppose, for example, that I am arguing

for a Constitutional ami:..1-1:.ent outlawing abortion. Once you understand

that the propositional content of my utterances is: "a Cons:itutional

amendment banning abortion should be passed," and you understand that my

utterances have the illocutionary force of argument, uptake has been

achieved. I iday argue all day and you may understand both what I am arguing

and that I am arguing, and yet remain unconvinced. Your continued

skepticism, or worse, does not undermine uptake.

According to Austin, uptake must be secured if the illocutionary act

Yet even this can pose problems. Not

is to be successfully accomplished.

only must the speaker/writer clarify propositional content, but he must

be sensitive to his audience's need to know. How much information does

his hearer/reader have already? How much and what kind of information

does he need to "take up" the speaker/writer's point? What kind of diction

and syntax will facilitate this uptake? The Gricean Cooperative Principle

It
of conversation can be seen as a st,2ategy for maximizing uptake.
 12

dictates, among other things, that contributions to the conversation must

avoid obscurity and ambiguity, be relevant, and be neither insufficiently

15
nor overly informative.

Now let's suppose that I have cooperated in the Griceaa sense and

have also been so persuasive that you not only take up my argument but are

convinced by it. You enlist yourself under my banner. In this case, I

have performed an additional, perlocutionary act and my utterances have

had their intended perlocutionary effect. As examples of perlocutionary

effects, Austin lists "convincing, persuading, deterring, and even . .

surprising or misleading" (p. 109). Perlocutionary acts are those we do

ky. saying something, whereas illocutionary acts are those performed in

saying something. Where illocutionary force is determined by communicative

purpose, perlocutionary effectiveness is determined by fulfillment of that

purpose.

Perlocutionary effectiveness demands attention to another sort of

audience needs and employment of techniques classically marshaled under

the rhetoric rubric. To effect perlocutionary purpose, the speaker/writer

must consider which rhetorical strategies are most likely to work on his

audience. Are his reader/hearers already with him or against him? What

arguments will bear most weight with either camp? What tone and diction

should he adopt and/or avoid? Of the things he might say, what will be

most convincing, least offensive?

Like illocutionary force, both uptake and perlocutionary effect are

influenced by context, that is, by the entire discourse situation. If

I am drunk, or half asleep, your careful discussion of Kantian ethics may

fail to get uptake, and if you are wearing a "Pro-Choice" button, I may
 13

despair of achieving the intended perlocuti'mary effect of my argument

for an anti-abortion amendment. Surely among the most valuable contributions

speech act theory can make to our understanding of language and its use

is its emphasis on context and on audience needs as part of that context.

As Austin insists, "The total speech act in the total speech situation

is the only actual pheromenon which, in the last resort, we are engaged

in elucidating" (p. 148).

Aspects of speech act context, many of them extra-linguistic, play a

major role in the tests employed by both Austin and Searle to determine

"That Searle calls the appropriateness and Austin the "felicity" or

"happiness" of a given illocutionary act (Austin, p. 14). Searle has

hypothesized sets of appropriateness conditions for a number of

illocutionary acts, but because Austin's felicity conditions are less

cumbersome and more easily generalized, I will use these here as I have

in my classes. Austinian felicity conditions (see pp. 14-15) may be

roughly grouped into three categories which I have labeled: 1) context,

2) content, and 3) intentions and consequences. "Context" would of course

cover all the factors we have just been considering. Pratt and Traugott

summarize these as including "social and physical circumstances; identities,

attitudes, abilities, and beliefs of participants; and relations holding

between participants" (p. 226). Also urder this heading comes the notion

of invoking an accepted, conventional, prcedure. At 8:00 a.m., it is

inappropriate, or "infelicitous," to greet someone with the words, "Good

evening"; and at a horserace it is inappropriate to bet on a race which

is already run. It is likewise inappropriate to use the slang phrase

"hangs out with" in .a formal essay on schools of philosophy.

 114

Rules in the second category dictate that the conventional procedure

invoked under category one must be executed fully and correctly. If in a

marriage ceremony the minister pauses for response and the bride says

"Waterloo" as opposed to "I do," the ceremony (and probably the marriage

itself) can be judged infelicitous. Similarly, a student who writes

garbled or fragmented sentences might be said to have violated category

two rules.

A third set of felicity conditions is akin to what Searle calls

sincerity conditions, which insist that the speaker know what he means

aal mean what he says. These are the rules which make lies infelicitous,

as well as the unconvincing, unfelt prose written by some of our students.

Breaking the rules in any of these ways will weaken perlocutionary

effect and lessen the chances of uptake, sometimes grievously. In Austin's

understanding, sins against category one and two dictates are mortal to

the speech act, voiding it entirely, while category three transgressions

are merely venial. As Austin puts it, an insincere speech act "is achieved,

although to achieve it in such circumstances . . . is an abuse of the

procedure. Thus, when I say 'I promise' and have no intention of keeping

'che promise/I have promised but . . ." (p. 16). Perhaps it is this

ability to stay morbidly alive which makes the insincere speech act more

dangerous than the unconventional, inappropriate, or incomplete one.

We can now see that speech act theory will provide us with the

concepts and terminology to address such comlon student "misfires" (again

the term is Austin's, p. 16) as lack of attention to audience needs and

communicative context, murkiness of purpose, unsuitable or uncompelling

voice, the deadening which often occurs when the student shifts from the
 15

vocal to the scribal modality, the use of diction which is ineffective or

unorthodox in the given circumstances, and even a tendency toward dangling

modifiers and sentence fragments. Rut can all this potential be put into

practice? Or, to paraphrase Austin again, holl can one do things with

speech act theory, especially in the composition classroom?

Claims for speech act theory's pragmatic potential have been large

and exciting indeed. Comparing rules derived from speech act theory to

those of phrase-structure, semantics, or transformational-generative grammar,

Richard Ohmann observes that, "Where transformations and the rest explicate

a speaker's grammatical competence, the rules for speech acts explicate

his competence in using speech to act (and be acted upon) within the matrix
16
of social and verbal conventions." The domain of speech act theory is

thus larger and more inclusive than those staked out by some other

approaches. This global inclusivity is also remarked by Edward P. J. Corbett

who says:

What is particularly fruitful about 6- speech act theorj 0

method of analysis is not only that it allows the critic

/Or, I would add, the teacher] to range freely from word

to sentence to larger units of discourse but that it

allows him to unite the provinces of the linguist as he

looks at the locutionary act, the semanticist as he looks

at the illocutionary act, and the rhetorician as he looks

at the perlocutionary act. It moves us from the rather

atomistic study of isolated units of language to the

larger social,political, aesthetic, and pragmatic contexts

17
of the language.
 16

Such enormous capacity has already been put to work in literary theory

and criticism. Speech act theory has been used to attempt a definition of

fiction itself, as well as to address specific literary texts and authors.

It has also been called upon to correct the new critical myopia which

viewed a text only in and of itself, and to encourage the text to be seen

as a communicative act. Pratt's well known Toward a Spef.lch Act Theory of

18
Liteary Discourse takes a long step in this direction,

In the application of speech act theory to single texts, perhaps the

most cited contribution was made by Stanley Fish in his 1976 article,

"How to Do Things with Austin and Searle: Speech Act Theory and Literary

Criticism. "19 Although Fish uses this forum in part to warn of certain

dangers incurred when the theory is applied indiscriminately, he also con-

structs a convincing analysis of Shakespeare's Coriolanus as a man who

ignores or violates the appropriateness conditions for certain speech acts,

notably those of making requeSts of others, accepting their thanks and

praise, and issuing declarations. The acts of making requests and accept-

ing praise imply 'leir performer's dependence on another's action or

judgment, and thereby put the speaker in a position Coriolanus abhors.

Avoidance of these speech acts betrays Coriolanus's arrogance and fancied

self-sufficiency, but his issuing of the unauthorized declaration is

downright subversive. When he banishes the citizens who have just banished

him, he rejects the appropriateness conditions governing the making of

declarations (since he is in no position to do this), flouts convention,

and thus challenges the very institutions on which conventions rest. On

the other hand, in the speech acts of refusing and promising, both of

which show the speaker dependent only upon himself, Coriolanus is proficient.
 17

Fish's approach thus demonstrates both that performance of and preference

for certain speech acts can serve as an index to character, and that

Coriolanus's fate is infelicitous in part because some this speech acts

are. The article highlights the real-world consequences, at least as

portrayed in the play, of language in action or language withheld.

Another analysis, by Richard Ohmann, focuses not on the character's

speech acts among other characters, but on those of the author addressed
20 Since Ohmann's concerns more closely approach those we
to the reader.

have as compos5tion teachers, I will spend a bit more time on his work.

As his text, Ohmann takes the following passage from Beckett's novel Watt,
their many
a passage which lists the members of the Lynch family and

maladies:

And then to pass on to the next generation there was Tom's

boy young Simon aged twenty, whose it is painful to relate

and his young cousin wife his uncle Sam's girl Ann, aged

nineteen, whose it will be learnt with regret beauty and

utility were greatly diminished by two withered arms and

a game leg of unsuspected tubercular origin, and Sam's

two surviving boys Bill and Mat aged eighteen and seventeen

respectively, who having come into this world respectively

blind and maim were known as Blind Bill and Maim Mat

respectively, and Sam's other married daughter Kate aged

twenty-one years, a fine girl but a bleeder (1), and her young

cousin husband her uncle Jack's son Sean aged twenty-one

years, a sterling fellow but a bleeder too . .

 18

(1) Haemophilia is, like-enlargement of the prostate, an

21
exclusively male disorder. But not in this vork.

To account for the discomfort and sense of dislocation this passage produces

in the reader, Ohmann begins by referring to Austin's felicity conditions.

Modifying these for strict application to the illocutionary act of

assertion, Ohmann says:

To make a statement felicitously, I must, among other

things, utter a declarative sentence . . . . I must be

the right person to make the statement . . . . I will

not get away with stating that the memory of your

grandfather just crossed your mind. I must not mumble

. . . or break off in the middle . . . . I must believe

what I say . . ., and I must not ground my future conduct

or speech in a contrary understanding of the state of the

world.22

Clearly, Beckett isn't playing by these rules. When the novel's narrator

claims that Kate is a haemophiliac and then appends a footnote denying

that she could be, he is violating either the condition of belief in his

statement or the condition that this belief shall govern subsequent speech

acts. In another kind of violation, the textual gap afler "it is painful

to relate" signals an incomplete speech act. If the gap is taken as

suggesting the narrator's ignorance, it is hard to reconcile this

ignorance with his later observation that Ann's game leg is of

"unsuspected tubercular origin." Since such a remark implies omniscience

(no one else in the story suspects this etiology), the reader is left

wondering what the narrator's position is vis a vis the story. Is he or

is he not the "right person to make . . . statements Cs] " here?

 19

The narrator's speech acts in this passage are therefore void, or

at best, insincere and self-contradictory. Moreover, the second sentence

of the footnote ("But not in this work.") exacerbates the confusion by

admitting a disjunction between the fictional and 'real" worlds, thus

problematizing context to the point that the reader is unsure how to

take the utterances. As they did in Coriolanus, these rule infractions

call into question the very institutions and conventions, both social

and literary, that give rise to them. Worse still, if, as Fish and

Searle would have it, speech act rules do not merely regulate, but

actually constitute some of these institutions, such infractions may reflect

a radical rejectior of the very possibility of communication or social

3
cooperation.?

The narrator also offends against speech act rules in lesser ways.

The passage displays grammatical anomalies and unnecessarily repeats

information. Examples are the three "respectively's" and "cousin wife

his uncle Sam's girl." It also mixes levels of diction, from the formal

"it will be learnt with regret" and "greatly diminished" on the one hand,

to the colloquial "a game leg" and "a fine girl but a bleeder" on the

other. All these confuse illocutionary Force and interfere with

perlocutionary effectiveness. A syntax marked more by conjunction than

subordination causes similar problems by refusing to assess or evaluate

the information presented anti establishing instead what Ohmann calls a

narrative "neutrality." We end, says Ohmann, with a view of the narrator

and a dizzy
as demonstrating "a baffling mixture of rhetorical impulses
24
sequence of emotional responses." Surely this is not a narrator (nor.

did Beckett intend to create one) who expects much in the way of uptake
 20 .

or achieved perlocutionary purposes. Nonetheless, it is precisely

the kind of narrator who best suits Beckett's perlocutionFry purposes:

to get us to experience the world as he sees it.

As the foregoing summary should suggest, speech act theory may help

us go beyond analysis of single texts toward the task of describing an

author's style or his trademark perlocutionary effects. J. E. Bunselmeyer,

for example, uses speech act theory to account in part for the evaluative

stance we feel Faulkner taking in what Bunselmeyer calls the "contemplative"

25
stretches of his prose.

Close reading of texts and stylistic analyses are certainly legitimate

concerns and practices in composition classes. But when our students'

essays come in, few of us recognize a Faulkner or a Bc:ckett. Can speech

act theory help us and our students with their work? Several theorists

have suggested that it can. Martin Steinmann, Jr., for example, points

to the distinction which speech act theory draws between illocutionary

effectiveness and perlocutionary effectiveness, and claims that this

distinction may help writers solve the related but not identical problems
26
of communicating a message and producing the desired effect. Noting

that complexity and confusion in prose tend to lessen its illocutionary

effectiveness, Steinmann speculates, "Perhaps topic sentences, transitions,

certain patterns of paragraph or overall organization, definitions,

examples, analogies, and so on make /xtended speechi7acts easier to

process. In any case, advice to speakers or writers to use such devices

to achieve coherence or unity is based upon. the assumption that they make

acts more effective illocutionarily." Steinmann admits that we know much

less about perlocutionary effectiveness, since this factor is subject to

 21

theory
so many variables; nonetheless, it could be argued that speech act

has done us some service simply by demonstrating that illocutionary and

perlocutionary effectiveness are different goals. The recognition that

one can be clear without being convincing is surely a first step toward

writing more persuasively.

Steinmann is not hLre directly concerned with composition teaching,

but Winifred Horner, who is, also advocates incorporation of practices and

precepts derived from speech act theory. In a recent article, Horner

points out that the speech act our students perform in producing expository

themes usually differs fundamentally from the act we would like them to
27 The difference is to be found
perform: that of asserting or affirming.

in appropriateness conditions. According to Searle, one of the

preparatory conditions for the successful performance of an act of asserting

is that "It is not obvious to both S[peakeri and Hfeareri that Hbaref7 knows
7
(does not need to be reminded of, etc.) p/opositional content/" (Speech

Acts, p. In the case of many student essays and most responses to

because the student

essay exam questions, this condition does not hold,

realizes that the teacher already knows what he has to say and only wants

to'know if he knows it. The peculiarity of this situation in which the

asserting
student less performs than imitates the illocutionary act of

vitiates its persuasiveness and substitutes the perlocutionary purpose of

earning an "A." As ways out-of this dilemma, Horner, suggests requiring

the student to write for a clearly defined audience, perhaps fellow

students or even a single, sharply visualized reader other than the

with a
teacher. This, she says, will provide for the student an audience

need to know. She also advises hiving students choose subjects about
which they know more than their teachers. None of these solutions

guarantees that the deadly act of "theme-ing" will disappear from the

student's speech act repertoire, and Horner sees difficulties in

implementing each. Nonetheless, she argues, both students and teachers

need to understand that the illocutionary force of "theme-ing" is

artificial.

Of course, many composition teachers are already using the strategies

Horner advocates, and have not needed speech act theory to validate them.

More novel uses of the theory are suggested in another, oft-reprinted

piece by Richard Ohmann.28 Here Ohmann is taking issue with the hallowed

dictum that adding concrete details makes for better writing. Ohmann

contends, rather, that adding details may not alter quality so much as

meaning. In speech act terms, we could say that these procedures change

effect.
an utterance's illocutionary force and perlocutionary

In evidence, Ohmann adduces two textbook examples, the first labeled

Here they are:
"weak" by the authors and the second "much better."

Abstract (weak)

The telephone is a great scientific achievement, but it

can also be a great inconvenience. Who could begin to

count the number of times that phone calls have come

from unwelcome people or on unwelcome occasions?

Telephones make me nervous.

. . . More Specific (much better)

The telephone is a great scientific achievement, but it

can also be a great big headache. More often than not,

that cheery ringing in my ear brings messages from the

Ace Bill Collecting Agency, my mother (who is feeling

23
 23

snubbed for the fourth time that week), salesmen of

encyclopedias and magazines, solicitors for the

Policemen's Ball and Disease of the Month Foundation,

and neighbors complaining about my dog. That's not to

mention frequent wrong numbers -- usually for someone

named "Arnie." The calls always seem to come at the

worst times, too. They've interrupted steak dinners,

hot tubs, Friday night parties, and Saturday morning

sleep-ins. There's no escape. Sometimes I wonder if

29
there are any telephones in padded cells.

The most obvious change in passage two is that lists of specific inter-

rupting people and the times they interrupt have replaced the passage one

generalizations: "unwelcome people . . on unwelcome occasions." In

addition, sensory details have been included in the rewrite, for example,

"headache" for the earlier "inconvenience" and "cheery ringing in my ear."

But, says Ohmann, both these sorts of changes serve to shift the writer's

emphasis from social to personal. Whereas the first passage, vague as it

is, establishes a concern with the telephone as part of a shared soclo-

,

historical nexus, the r.-ision is interested only in the author's own

experience with this instrument. In speech act theory terminology, we

might say that the illocutionary force has changed from that of acts which

make statements requiring evidence to that of acts whose propositional

content need be vouched for only by the speaker. Although the larger

illocutionary intent of both passages is verdictive ,(that is, it assesses

or evaluates), in the second version expressives have replaced

representatives. This substitution greatly reduces risk, but at the cost

 24

of a corresponding and probably unintended shift in perlocutionary effect.

As Ohmann puts it, the narrowed "scope accords well with the impression

given by the rewrite of a person incapable of coping with events,

victimized by others, fragmented, distracted -- a kind of likable schlemiel.

He or she may be a less 'boring' writer, but also a less venturesome and

more isolat^d person, the sort who chatters on in a harmless gossipy way

without much purpose or consequence

30

Ohmann does not praise the first passage. But while admitting that

it begs for development, he would direct that development toward further

exploration of abstractions. He suggests investigation of the paradox of

scientific "achievemen-s" which end by infringing on, even imperiling our

lives, or the hierarchial social and financial structure revealed when one

asks for whom the telephone is inconvenient and for whom it is a tool of
4:4

power and control. The mere amassing of detail, without attention to the

illocutionary force and perlocutionary effect which those details will

have, amounts here to what Ohmann calls "a strategy for, sacrificing thought.
31
to feckless merriment."

Like Ohmann, I find it useful to have the terms of speech act theory

on hand as I attempt to help students grasp such amorphous notions as tone,

style, telling detail, support of thesis, and rhetorical effectiveness.

The theory can be especially useful in approaching expressive essays, which

do not usually have a thesis per se, but which must have a clnar, con-

sistent, and unified effect upon their reader.

In "A Linguist's View of the Composing Process," James Stalker cites

this sample freshman essay, written.in response to the assignment to

32
narrate "My Most Frightening Experience":
 -25--

SNOW SHJE HUNTING

(1) January 4, 1968, today is when my friends Neil,

Duane and I are going up to Grayling, Michigan, hunting

snowshoe rabbits. (2) The day was like any common winter

day in Michigan. (3) Cruising down the freeway we noticed

a fine mist collecting on the front windshield. (4) The

radio was playing some of the golden top hits. (5) Suddenly

the warning light came on, indicating that the car was over

heating. (6) I pulled into 'the first gas station. (7) The

trouble was in the automatic transmission, throwing out

fluid onto the front windshield. (8) We found at keeping

the speed to 50 mph that the'fluid level and heat guage

L'emained constant.

(9) Several hours later we reached Grayling. (10) Snowing

quite hard we found a lane to pull into. (11) After s:ouLilig

around we discovered an abandoned cellar. (12) This we

utilized as a shelter.

(13) Two days of bitter cold and deep snow no luck

in hunting, we were ready to head back. (14) However it had

rained and froze on, during the night.

(15) With a heavy loaded car we proceeded to make our

long journey home. (16) The roads were a solid transparent

glass coloring. (17) The only possible way to, drive was with

two wheels on the shoulder.

(18) We were doing fine until a steep decline. (19) Going,

(20) Midway was a curve.

as slow as I could we started down.
 26

(21) The car went sliding out of control. (22) All that

was visible were trees from the other side. (23) Knowing

that any moment we would crash. (24) Acti%,:s, out of mere

reflex I hit the power brakes. (25) Anyone knows that this

is exactly what you don't want to do in an ice-skid. (26)

However we proved statistics wrong, for this time the rear

wheels with power brakes caught on the shoulder, of the other

side of the road.

(27) With this hair raising experienCe passed. (28)

We had a fairly safe trip home, except for witnessing an

one car skid off from 1-75 S.

(29) Talking to an older friend about our Snow Shoe

hunting trip, I learned that their had been an epidemic which

had made the Snow Shoe rabbit almost extinct in the Grayling

area.

Stal r notes that one of the theme's major problems is uncertainty about

s audience. The short paragraphs and use of a date in the opening

sentence suggest that the student is writing for newspaper readers. But

"decline"
from his incorporation of formal diction ("utilized" for "used,"

for "hill") and the many participial phrases and clauses, we might infer

an attempt to impress an English teacher. A third audience seems to be

on more intimate terms with the writer such intimate terms, in fact, that

they will know who Neil and Duane are and accept the occasional conversational

informality and sentence fragments. Because the hearers to whom these speech

acts are addressed are protean, perlocutionary problems arise.

the
These arc compounded when we consider that the assignment asked
To fulfill the
student to narrate his most-frightening experience.
t 27

assignment, he should have concentrated on the perlocutionary purpose of

arousing apprehension and excitement in the reader. Instead, he loses his

chance for perlocutionary effectivenes.; through a long-winded and only

tangentially related introduction to the crucial scene, the brief and

almost dead-pan narration of the scene itself, and a conclusion which

encourages belief that the essay's overriding illocutionary force is

irony: the irony of there being no rabbits to hunt in the first place.

Perlocutionary effectiveness suffers further from the fact that the essay's

title implies an illocutionary intent of asserting facts about something,

4
but is ambiguous even in this implication. Will the writer discuss hunting

on snowshoes or hunting snow shoe rabbits? Actually neither illocutionary

promise is kept. The essay contains neither snow shoes nor rabbits, and its

real force is supposed to reside in a careening car on an 'Icy hill. What

Ann Berthoff calls the "supergloss," a concept which. incorporates those of

thesis and overall effect, must bind a successful extended illocutionary

33
act into a cohesive whole. This writer cannot perform a felicitous

speech act without first deciding what it is.

What of the essay's grammatical and usage errors, such ad its

sentence fragments (23, 27), dangling modifier (10), missing syntax (7, 18),

and the use of "their" for "there" (29)? Speech act theory recognizes

these as failures to produce propositional content which both refers and

predicates or, alternatively, as failures to observe the felicity condition

stipulating that a speech act be executed correc'Zly and completely. But

if we want our students to stop producing, such misconstructions, it is

These,
far more important that they see the consequences or rule breaking.

too, the theory can elucidate. Speech acts are rule-governed behaviors.
 28

Breaking rules makes acts infelicitous. Infelicitous acts are unlikely

to be taken up, let alone produce the desired perlocutionary effect. More

simply put, errors even at the level of spelling interfere with communication.

They put language out of action.

.:."ome of the foregoing observations are Stalker's; some are mine. }or

Stalker attacks thz essay's problems in cohesion, emphasis, and usage

through methods provided by text analysis and transformational grammar. My

point is that he needn't have. The arsenal of speech act theory houses

most of the weapons we need.

I am at present testing this bold hypothesis by using speech act theory

as the conceptual base for my freshman composition classes. These classes

begin with a week's introduction to the theory, as part of which students

are asked to transcribe a few minutes of sample speech acts, produced either

by a single speaker or by two or more in conversation. The communicative

context for these acts may be a classroom, dormitory corridor, news

broadcast, soap opera, TV commercial, family dinner table, sorority or

club meecing, in short, anywhere students hear speech acts. I insist that

the recorded acts be spoken rather than written to insure greater va...iety

in the samplings; after all, while written speech acts vary enormously in

illocutionary force, those students woulS.see are predominantly .

representatives. I have also assumed that the notion of speech as action

would be less foreign than that of writing as action, and that by securing

the uptake of the former concept I could encourage carryover to the latter.

These sample speech acts are analyzed for type, illocutionary force,

felicity, likelihood of uptake, and perlocutionary effect, both intended

and actual. After a random sampling of the samples is discussed in class,

2J
 29

dimensions of their own

students write up their findings regarding these

transcriptions. Write-ups are discussed with me in conference so.that

misconceptions and confusions can be minimized.

The exercise has yielded some useful concepts about how language
asking her,
operates. One student's transcription began with her roommate

'"What are you doing tonight?" Whiie this looked to have the simple

illocutionary force of requesting information, as it turned out, the

Her roommate
question also marked an attempt to manipulate the student.
promised them the
had invited two boys over for the evening and had

student's company as well as hers. Thus her question was the opening

to spend the evening

gambit in a campaign to change the student's plans
this insight into
studying. An analysis of illocutionary force produced

strategic uses of language.

organic object for
A later assignment asks students to observe an
the object each day, and
five successive days, write for ten minutes on
description of the object.
then use those journal entries to produce a
single, extended speech
I advise them to think of this description as a
corresponding
act with one overriding illocutionary force and a

perlocutionary effect. When students follow this advice, they produce

with clinical detail and

descriptions which do not, for example, begin

about learning to love my friend the peapcd.

end in vague emotionalism
In one successful
Rather, they aim for a unified impact on the reader.
of trying to keep a
description, an analogy was drawn between the process
in a nursing home with an
fading rm-e alive and the student's experience

elderly, dying patient. Another good description, this one of an apple,

the student had noticed, while

was organized around a series of contrasts
 30
1

still another 1:nked the removal of fruit from a tree to her own removal

from her family home to college. With a single perlocutionary purpose

firmly in mind, these students pruned and shaped their material to produce

the desired effect.

Like many writing teachers, I put students' essays through the

process of peer group evaluation and here, too, the theory has proved

valuable. Student: no longer respo^d with broad generalities to each

other's work. Instead, they consider and record for me the overall

illocutionary force, intended perlocutionary effect,and strategies for

promoting uptake of each essay, their own and those of others in their

group.

In general, I have used the theory as a heuristic for helping

students understand how language does its job and to bring clarity into

formerly hazy precinct:_ of theory and practice. Instead of style and

tone, I can talk about hors illocutionary i rce suits propositional content.

Where once I urged students to formulate a thesis and to meet their

audience's needs, I can now speak of promoting uptake and maximizing

perlocutionary effect.

Does all this merely represent the substitution of one complex jargon

for another? Of course. But speech act theory jargon has several

advantages over the traditional. First it is new and therefore potentially

exciting. 'Its newness also means that every student has an equal chance

it. No student need feel that because he failed to understand a term

presented in high"school or junior high, that notion is forever

Secondly, jargon id fun. Have you noticed the glee with

indecipherable.
"semiotic"
which beginning graduate students in English spout terms like

31
 31

and "deconstruction"? First year medical students get a similar kick out of

"osteomyelitis" and "teratogenic." Use of jargon creates an in-group of the

informed, surely a comfortable place for anyone to be, especially a shaky

student writer. A final advantage is that speech act theory terms can be

clearly defined and demonstrated in ways the student uncle 413 I have

never found this the case with terms like "style," "tone," and 'Lhesis."

W. Ross Winterowd has said that "speech act theory begins to systematize
34
the exploration of the rhetorical transaction between speaker and hearer."

In so doing, it makes this transaction more intelligible and, therefore

more teachable.

I am far from hailing speech act theory as a panacea for all the woes

of taking or teaching composition classes. For example, it will not do

much to promote what the sentence-combiners call "syntactic fluency,"

although it can speak to the effects of that fluency or its lack. Complex

sentences which subordinate or have embedded appositives will bear a more

evaluative illocutionary force than will a parataxic string of simp's

sentences. But speech act theory can't show students how to subordinate

or use appositives, any more than it can show them how to avoid sentence

fragments and comma splices. Again, it is limited to pointing out what

happens when they splice and fragment.

Nor does the theory have a patent on the concerns we've been discuss

ing. 'Among complementary or related approaches are Burke's dramatistic

35
pentad of act, actor/agent, scene, agency, and purpose; Pike's tagmemic

heuristic which allows us to place the same thing or concept in the

contexts in its own unique features, its changes over time, or its place
36
in a broader scheme; James Kinneavy's emphasis on the centrality of

32
 32

37 and the interest deriving from Malinowski and

purpose in discourse;

Firth in the shaping of meaning by situational and cultural context.

3e

Also of interest to practitioners of speech act theory would be Halliday

and Hasan's attention to situational context or "register," as well as

their influential definition of a text as "a continuum of meaning-in-context,

constructed around the semantic relation of cohesion."39 The list of

additional recommended reading could be extended almost indefinitely.

Thus I should not be construed as claiming that the speech act theorists

have cornered any markets.

A final necessary caveat is an admission that the data isn't in yet.

Assumptions and techniques like the ones Ohmann, Stalker, and I are

advocating a're only now being tested in the trenches. Yet even my own

experience steels me to keep trying. To return to the story which prefacid

these remarks, it may be that speech act theory can coax our students out

of the closed car of writing apprehension and performance impotence into

the open air of communicative competence.. Can we, as writing teachers,

afford to ignore that possibility?

 33

Notes

1
Robert Zoellner, "Talk-Write: A Behavioral Pedagogy for Composition,"

College English, 30 (1969), 273.

2
W. Ross Winterowd, "Linguistics and Composition," in Teaching

Composition: Ten Bibliographical Essays, ed. Gray Tate (Fort Worth: Texas

Christian University Press, 1976), p. 217; W. Ross Winterowd, Contemporary

Rhetoric: A Conceptual Background with Readings (New York: Harcourt

Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 18; and Dan I. Slobin, Psycholinguistics

(Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1971).

3
Winterowd, "Linguistics and Composition," D. 217.

4
Zoellner, p. 307.

5
James L. Collins, "Spoken Language and the Development of Writing

Abilities, ", A paper presented at the Conference on College Composition and

Communication, Dallas, Texas, March 27, 1981, ERIC ED 199729.

6
John C. Shafer, "The Linguistic Analysis of Spoken and Written Texts,"

in Exploring Speaking-Writing Relationships: Connections and Contrasts,

eds. Barry M. Kroll and Roberta J. Vann (Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1981),

-pp. 1-31.

7
Shafer, p. 3t.

8
See Richard. Ohmann, "Speech, Action, and Style," in Literary Style:

A Symposium; ed. and trans. Seymour Chatman (London: ,Oxford University

Press, 1971), p. 259.

34
 34

well Hymes, "Competence and Performance in Linguistic Theory,"

in Language Acquisition: Models and Methods, eds. R. Huxley and E. Ingram

(New York: Academic Press, 1971).

10 My discussion of speech act theory depends largely on the following

sources: J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Wcrds, Second Edition

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975); John R. Searle, Speech Acts:

An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (London: Cambridge University

Press, 1969); John R. Searle, "A Classifiation of Illocutionary Acts,"

Language in Scoiety, 5 (1976), 1-23; and Elizabeth Closs Traugott and

Mary Louise Pratt, L:..guistics for Students of Literature (New York:

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980). Further citations 'to these references

will be made parenthetically.

11
H. P. Grice, "Meaning," in Readings in the Philosophy of Language,

eds. J. Rosenberg and C. Travis (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall,

1971),- p. 442. Rpt. from The Philosophical Review, 3 (1957), 377-88.

12 Martin Steinmann, Jr., "Speech Acts and Rhetoric," in Rhetoric and

Change, eds. William E. Tanner and J. Dean Bishop (Mesquite, Tex.

Ide House, 1982), pp. 96-97.

13
See Roger W. Brown and Marguerite Ford, "Address in American English,"

Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 62 (1961), 375-85.

14
See John R. Searle, "Indirect. Speech Acts," in Syntax and Semantics,

Vol. III, Speech Acts, eds. Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (New York:

Academic Press, 1975), pp. 59-60; Herbert H. Clark and Eve Clark, Psychology

An Introduction to Psycholinguistics(New York: Harcourt

and Language:

Brace Jovanovich, 1977), p. 29; Kent Bach and Robert M. Harnish, Linguistic
ir
35

Communication and Speech Acts (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1979), Chapt. 9;

and Johan Vander Auwera, Indirect Speech Acts Revisited (Bloomington:

Indiana University Linguistics Club, 1980).

15
H. P. Grice, "Logic and Conversation," in Syntax and Semantics,

Vol. III, Speech Acts, pp. 41-58.

16
Ohmann, "Speech, Action, and Style," p. 247.

17 Edward P. J. Corbett, "Approaches to the Study of Style," in

Teaching Composition: Ten Bibliographical Essays, p. 92.

18 Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977).

19Modern Language Notes, 91 (1976), 983-1025.

2
Ohmann, "Speech, Action, and Style," pp. 441-59.

21 Samuel. Beckett, Watt (New fork: Grove Press, 1959), p. 102.

22 Ohmann, "Speech, Action, and Style," p. 247.

23
See Fish, p. 1008.

24 Ohmann, "Speech, Action, and Style," p. 242.

25"Faulkner's Narrative Styles," American Literature, 53 (1981),

424-42.

26 See Steinmann's "Speech Acts and Rhetoric," p. 99-100.

27 'Theme-in in
Winifred B. Horner, "Speech-Act and Text-Act Theory:

Freshman Composition," CCC, 30 (1979), 165-69.

28 Definite, Specific, Concrete Language," in The Writing Teacher's

Sourcebook, eds. Gary Tate and. Edward P. J. Corbett (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1981), pp. 379-89.

 36

2 9David Skwire and Francs Chitwood, Student's Book of College English

(Glencoe Press, 1978), pp. 348-1-19.

30
Ohmann, "Use Definite, a.Decific, Concrete Language," p. 382.

31
Ohmann, "Use Definite, Specific, Concrete 7,a,ialiage," p. 382.

32
CEA Critic, 40, No. 4 (May 1978), 15-23.

Berthoff, Forming / Thinking / Writing: The Co,-posing

Imaginai n (Montclair, N.J.: Boyton / Cook, 1982), pp. 185-88

34
Winterowd, "Linguistics and Composition," p. 211.

35
See, for example, Burke's pentad as modified and explained in William

Irmscher, Holt Guide to English, Third Edition (New York: Holt, Rinehart

and Winston, 1981), pp. 27-44.

36
See Richard E. Young, Alton L. Becker, and Kenneth L. Pike, Rhetoric:

Discovery and Change (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970).

37 See James Kinneavy, A Theory of Discourse (Englewood Cliffs, .J.:

Prentice Hall, 1971), p. 2.

38 B. Malinowski, Coral Gardens and Their Magic, Vol. II (London:

George Allen and Unwin, 1935), pp. 18 and 51; and J. R. Firth, "The Tech-

nique of Semantics," in Papers in Linguistics 1934-1951 (1935; rpt.

London: Oxford University Press, 1957).

39 Longman,
M.A.K. Halliday and R. Hasan, Cohesion in English (London:

1976), p. 25; see also Shafer, pp. 17-18.

37