In response to my recent struggle to find a single word that encompasses both “request” and “proposal,” James Bullock referred me to linguists who study speech acts, acts that we perform through language. Examples of speech acts include requesting, proposing, praising, announcing, nagging, denouncing, welcoming, and convicting.
A number of linguists have created taxonomies that sort speech acts into categories. In some taxonomies, the category that covers “request” and “proposal” is imperative. In more recent taxonomies, linguists typically refer to speech acts in this category as directives. This category (under either name) also includes speech acts such as requiring, permitting, advising, demanding, telling, and suggesting.
Sadly, neither “directive” nor “imperative” solves the problem I wrote about last month. — “When people resist your directives …” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. So I have to agree with Ron Thompson and Pat Sciacca that I’m unlikely to find a single word to use in my writing.
But my search for the right word was only a small part of a larger, more important quest: to explore how the form of our requests (or proposals) affects the way people respond. Thanks to James’s pointer, I learned a great deal about that. I will write about that in the future.
If you want to learn what linguists have to say about different kinds of speech acts, here are some sources to explore:
- How to Do Things With Words . John L. Austin.
- One of the earlier descriptions of speech acts. Other sources often refer to this one as foundational.
- Expression and Meaning . John R. Searle.
- Searle is a major authority on the theory of speech acts. The first chapter of describes a brief taxonomy of speech acts, and gives the criteria that Searle used to sort speech acts into categories.
- Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts . Kent Bach and Robert M. Harnish.
- Bach and Harnish present a deeper, more detailed taxonomy than either Austin or Searle. The organize directives into subcategories: request, question, require, permit, and advise.
- English Speech Act Verbs: A Semantic Dictionary . Anna Wierzbicka.
- This book is a gold mine for me. It defines in extraordinary detail approximately 150 English speech act verbs, including the ones I’m most interested in (e.g. ask, demand, order, suggest, propose, insist). This “dictionary” avoids much of the circularity that is prevalent in most dictionaries by defining each verb in terms of number of sentences build from a very small lexicon of very simple words. For example, here is the definition of order:
- I assume you understand that you have to do what I say I want to you to do.
- I say: I want you to cause X to happen.
- I say this because I want to cause you to do it.
- I assume that you will do it because if that.
A big thank you to James Bullock for pointing me in this direction!
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First, you are welcome, Dale. I read your newsletter, website, and blog regularly. So if I added something useful to you, think of it as giving back.
Second, about “speech acts”, the taxinomies are interesting, and useful, I think but not the whole story. The big-P philosophers related to “speech acts” talk about reality as a cultural construct, one created through conversation. Isn’t this one POV about building a team, or a community, or a piece of software?
More interesting to me is the related theory of describing a shared world through a series of conversational acts. Any one of these kinds of transactions: demand, request, etc. is proposing a future that we can then engage in or not. A conversation is often represented as a state machine by these folks (some of whom are all delighted at their cleverness in discovering state machines. Sigh.)
I think there is a useful intersection between the speech act folks, the post-modernist “reality as a social construct” folks, and some rigorous models. For example, C. A. R. Hoare’s _Communicating Sequential Processes_ maps right into the state machines that describe conversations. If the two “coupled” machines don’t share a state when they interact, nonsense follows. Sort of like someone trying to make a “demand” of you when you only recognize their right to make a “request.”
There’s something powerful about the idea of conversations as ways of elaborating shared meaning, without needing to drag in the dissing of “rationalism” or abandoning formal models that so often goes along with that POV. Why not both?
(That’s an offer. I’m curious about a world we understand both of these ways at once.)
- Jim