Reflection: English verbs – English speech act theory?

There is no doubt that theorists such as Austin were influenced by performative verbs as they formulated speech act theory. Performative or speech act verbs offer tangible signs of conventional illocutionary acts. However, the danger here is that the theory is being shaped by the performative verbs of English, yet assumed to be appropriate for other languages and cultures. Rosaldo (1982: 228) points out that John R. Searle, a pupil of Austin’s, “uses English performative verbs as guides to something like a universal law”. But her study of the performative verbs used by the Ilongots illustrates that such verbs are not at all universal. Two quotations from her work elaborate the point:

To Westerners, taught to think of social life as constituted by so many individuated cells, prosocial impulses and drives may seem a necessary prerequisite to social bonds, and so the notion of a world where no one “promises,” “apologizes,” “congratulates,” “establishes commitments,” or “gives thanks,” may seem either untenable or anomic. Certainly, when in the field, I was consistently distressed to find that Ilongots did not appear to share in my responses to such things as disappointment or success, and that they lacked expressive forms with which to signal feelings of appreciation, obligation, salutation, and regret, like our “I’m sorry” or “good morning”. (Rosaldo 1982: 217–218)

The closest Ilongot equivalent to our “promise” is called sigem, a formulaic oath by salt, wherein participants declare that if their words prove false, their lives, like salt, will be “dissolved.” But Ilongot oaths are different from our “promises” in the central fact that sigem speaks not to commitments personally assumed (and for which subsequent violators might, as individuals, be held in fault) but to constraints based on external, “supernatural” sorts of law. (ibid.: 219)

The problem described in this box spurred Anna Wierzbicka, Cliff Goddard and colleagues to develop a Natural Semantic Metalanguage, as elaborated. The point of this metalanguage was to enable descriptions, including descriptions of speech acts, without the bias caused by the particular descriptive language (see especially Wierzbicka’s 1987 description of English speech act verbs).