Partial speech acts
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4396/2025060I02Keywords:
illocutionary force, public commitments, private commitments, subjectivity, iteration, hearer’s meaningAbstract
Inspired by two examples from US political discourse, I propose that speech acts may be performed only partially, in order to steer things in a certain direction, without taking up the full set of commitments that would normally flow from performing an act. A speech act, when partially performed, is still felicitous in the sense that it has changed the world in some way but it has only some of the real-world consequences of its fully performed counterpart. That is why partial speech acts are different from infelicitous ones. Typically, in partial speech acts, the change in the world that the speaker aims to bring about (viz., the commitments created by the act) concerns relational aspects of the speech act such as manipulating face and power dynamics and not the (main) illocutionary point of the act. Politicians exploit this possibility to set and re-set power hierarchies (as in, to test how much they can ‘get away with’). By offering a way of reconciling conflicting public and private commitments, partial speech acts allow us to realize ourselves as flesh-and-blood (not model) speakers with conflicting goals and offer a theoretical account of how this (conscious or subconscious) ambivalence of our social action lives on in discourse.
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