Speech Act Theory

While reading the introduction to Richard Ohmann's essay I was struck by the fact that he was "one of the first American scholars to introduce speech act theory" (1877). I decided to look this up on the Internet to find out what it was all about. I'm not quite sure why it caught my attention, other than the fact that I had never before heard of it.

I came across a website that was a chapter out of someones dissertation. The site was entitled Rhetorica. Here is the link: http://www.rhetorica.net/speech.htm.

According to this website, speech-act theory was proposed by J.L. Austin. In the simplest terms this theory states that "to say something is to do something." Austin breaks this down into two categories: performative and constantive. An example of a performative speech act would be a wedding, during which the priest says "I now pronounce you man and wife." According to the essay this proposition creates a social reality, and thus the speech is achieving something beyond itself. Constantives are statements that can be judged as true or false and attempt to "describe reality.

I think (if I am grasping the concept speech-act theory correctly) that even the "simplest statement" has much large implications. One cannot simply look at a sentence, but must instead look at it's many layers to find the action it elicits.

I think that the reason Ohmann might have been a proponent of the speech-act theory could be its ties to studying words and sentences within a social context. This clearly has connections to Marxism the the stress it places on society and cultural relevance.