Pragmatics
Felicity
Conditions
Speech Acts
Dr. Shazia Akbar Ghilzai
Department of English
Quaid-e-Azam University
Pragmatics
Based primarily on the ideas of Paul Grice:
People interact having minimal assumptions
(implicatures) about one another;
Two types of implicatures: conventional and
conversational;
Conventional implicatures do not require any
particular context in order to be understood (or
inferred);
Conversational implicatures are context – dependant.
What is implied varies according to the context of an
utterance.
In pragmatics, Conversational implicature is an
indirect or implicit speech act: the phenomenon
whereby a speaker says one thing and thereby
conveys (typically, in addition) something else.
Grice’s Cooperative Principle
Grice’s cooperative principle is a set of norms that
are expected in conversations. It consists of four
maxims, we have to follow in order to be
cooperative and understood:
•Maxim of quality : As speaker we have to tell the
truth or something that is provable by adequate
evidence.
•Maxim of quanity: We have to be as informative
as required, we should not say more or less.
•Maxim of relation: Our response has to be
relevant to the topic of discussion.
•Maxim of manner: We have to avoid ambiguity or
obscurity; we should be direct and straightforward.
Speech acts
Definition:
Actionsperformed via utterances are
generally called speech acts.
Stages
locutionary act: physical utterance by
the speaker
Illocutionary act: the intended meaning
of the utterance by the speaker
(performative)
Perlocutionary act: the action that
results from the locution.
Speech Act
Example:
I will see you later.
Utterance= locutionary.
Communicative
Force(promise)=illocutionary.
Action Performed=Per-locutionary act.
Felicity Conditions:
Definition:
In order to "do things with words", certain things
must be true of the context in which speech acts
are uttered. In other words, a sentence must not
only be grammatical to be correctly performed, it
must also be felicitous.
Felicity Conditions:
The FELICITY CONDITIONS of an illocutionary
act are conditions that must be fulfilled in
the situation in which the act is carried out if
the act is to be said to be carried out
properly, or felicitously.
There are certain expected or appropriate
circumstances technically known as felicity
conditions for the performance of speech
act.
Felicity Conditions:
Example:
I sentence you to six months in prison.
Felicity Conditions:
Said by a judge.
Said in a courtroom.
Felicity Conditions:
Suppose I am joking with some friends
and say,
I now pronounce you husband and wife.
I have not, in fact, married them.
My speech act is infelicitous.
Felicity Conditions
Types:
1. General Conditions:
General conditions presuppose the
participants’ knowledge of the language
being used and his non- playacting.
Example:
The order of a teacher to a student or
elder order to the younger one.
Felicity Conditions
Types:
2. Content Condition:
Content conditions concern the appropriate
content of an utterance.
For promise and warning:
Context of an utterance must be a future
event.
The actions or performance of an utterance
or illocutionary force must be future act.
Felicity Conditions
Types:
3. Preparatory conditions
Preparatory conditions deal with differences of
various illocutionary acts (e.g. those of
promising or warning).
Promise
The event will not happen by itself.
The event will have a beneficial effect.
Warning
The event will occur.
The event will not have a beneficial effect.
Felicity Conditions
Types
4. Sincerity conditions:
Sincerity conditions count with speaker’s
intention to carry out a certain act
Promise
The speaker genuinely intends to carry out
the future action.
Warning
The speaker genuinely believes that the
future event will not have a beneficial event.
Felicity Conditions
Types
5.Essential conditions:
Essential conditions combine with a
specification of what must be in the
utterance content, the context, and the
speaker’s intentions, in order for a
specific act to be appropriately
(felicitously) performed.
Continue…..
Promise
Create an obligation to carry out an
action.
Bring the performer from non obligation
to obligation.
Warning
The utterance changes my state from non
informing of a bad future event to
informing
Practice
Given below are illocutionary acts, and
for each act there are four suggested
felicity conditions.
Indicate the correct felicity conditions by
circling your choices.
Practice
(1)Promising:
(a) The speaker must intend to carry out
the thing promised.
(b) The speaker must be inferior in status
to the hearer.
(c) The thing promised must be something
that the hearer wants to happen.
(d) The thing promised must be morally
wrong
Practice
(2)Apologizing:
a. The thing apologized for must be (or must
have been) unavoidable.
b. The thing apologized for must be morally
wrong.
c. The hearer must not want the thing apologized
for to happen (or to have happened).
d. The speaker must be responsible for the thing
apologized for
Practice
(3) Greeting:
a) The speaker and the hearer must be of
different sex.
b) The speaker and the hearer must not be in
the middle of a conversation.
c) The speaker must believe the hearer to
have recently suffered a loss.
d) The speaker feels some respect and/or
sense of community (however slight) with
the hearer.
Practice
(5) Protesting:
a) The speaker and the hearer must have
recently been in conflict with each other.
b) The speaker must disapprove of the state of
affairs protested at.
c) The state of affairs protested at must be
disapproved of by the community generally.
d) The hearer must be held to be responsible (by
the speaker) for the state of affairs protested
at.
Practice….More
Label the illocutionary acts in the
following situations felicitous or
infelicitous, applying normal everyday
criteria. In each case also name the
illocutionary act concerned. We have
done the first one for you.
Continue…..
Continue….
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Conclusion
A good way of discovering the felicity
conditions of an illocutionary act is to
imagine a situation in which a speaker
carries out such an act, or attempts to,
but something in the situation makes
the act ‘misfire’, or not come off
appropriately.
.
Continue……
Continue………
For example,
The speaker is definitely carrying out an
act of offering a cigarette, but there is
something odd, or infelicitous, about the
offer, as the hearer already has the
cigarette. This shows that one of the
felicity conditions for the act of offering
is that the hearer must not already have
the thing offered
