Classification of intersubjective illocutionary acts

Abstract

An illocutionary act presupposes not only a speaker, but also an other who is the intended recipient of the utterance's illocutionary force. Thus every illocutionary act has an intersubjective component; it connects two centers of experience in a particular way. This article proposes that the intersubjective illocutionary force of an utterance depends on (1) whether it concerns the speaker's or other's experience, (2) whether it takes the speaker's or other's viewpoint, and (3) whether or not the speaker must presume specific knowledge of the other to make the utterance. These three dichotomous principles of classification are called source of experience, frame of reference, and focus, respectively. The eight possible combinations of “speaker” and “other” values define a mutually exclusive and exhaustive set of families of intersubjective illocutionary acts – Disclosure, Advisement, Edification, Confirmation, Question, Interpretation, Acknowledgment, and Reflection – which I have elsewhere called “verbal response modes.” The modes are associated with characteristic grammatical forms, which retain a “formal” portion of their illocutionary force even when used to express a different intent, yielding a taxonomy of 64 distinct form-intent combinations. Differences between this taxonomy and other taxonomies of illocutionary acts are partially traceable to the present system's roots in the study of psychotherapeutic processes and the previous systems' roots in the study of explicit performatives.