Acting and Conversing

Speech Acts     
In speech acts, J.L Austin has a theory about the performative acts in which a person is not just saying something but it is actually doing something if certain real world conditions are met. He pointed out that perforamtives should met felicity conditions in order to be successful. A conventional procedures,  all participants must execute the procedures, and finally the necessary thoughts, feelings, and intentions must be present in all parties. Austin devides performatives into five categories; verdictives, exercitives, commissives, behabitives, and expositives.

On the other side, Searle argued that we can speak minimally at three kinds of acts. There are utterance acts which refers to the fact that we must utter words and sentences when we want to say anything at all, prepositional acts which refers to those matters that have to do with referring and predicitng, and illocutionary acts which refers to the intents of the speakers. As the additinon, Searle also regulates some rules in governing promise-making. Those are the propositional content, preparatory rules, sincerity rules and the essential rules.
In oppose to Austin, who concentrate his study on how the speakers realize their intentions in speaking, Searle focuses on how listeners respond to the utterances. Both Austin and Searle recognize that the people use language to achieve the variety of objectives.

Cooperation and Face; Grice and Goffman
Based on Grice’s view, it is stated that we are able to converse each other because of the recognition of common goals and the specific ways of achieving them. The acts in conversation should in line with cooperative principle, the general principle in which a mutual engagement happen between listeners and speakers. There are four maxims of cooperative principles (Grice; 1975). Those are quantity which makes the contribution as the required informatives, quality in which the belief should not be falsely said or lack adequate evidence, relation as the simple injunctions, and manner to avoid obscurity of expression and ambiguity.

In the Griece sense, a conversation is a cooperative activity depends on the speakers and listeners sharing a set of assumption. But, it is also cooperative in the sense that speakers and listeners tend to accept each other for what they claim to be, that is, the accepts of ‘face’ that the other offers. Goffman (1955) called ‘face’ as the work of presenting faces to each others, protecting our own’s face and the other’s face. In other word, ‘the affective state of the speaker’ and ‘his profile of identity’ are much the same as the idea of ‘face’.