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<Paper uid="P81-1027">
  <Title>A SITUATION SEMANTICS APPROACH TO THE ANALYSIS OF SPEECH ACTS 1</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1. INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> During thc past two decades, much work in linguistics has focused on sentences as minimal units of communication, and the project of rigorously characterizing the structure of sentences in natural language has met with some succcss. Not surprisingly, however, sentcnce grammars have contributed little to the analysis of discourse, Human discourse consists not just of words in sequences, hut of words in sequences directed by a speaker to an addressee, used to represent situations and to reveal intentions. Only when the addressee has apprehcndcd both these aspects of the message communicated can the message be interpretecL The analysis of discourse that emerges from Austin (1962), grounded in a theory of action, takes this view as ccntral, and thc concept of thc speech act follows naturally. An utterance may have a conventional meaning, but the interpretation of the actual meaning of the utterance as it is used in discourse depends on evaluating thc utterance in the context of the set of intentions which represcnt the illocutionary mode of its presentation. Put another way (paraphrasing Searle (1975:3)), the speaker's intention is to produce understanding, consisting of the knowledge of conditions on the speech act being pcrformed.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> If we are to take scrionsly Scarle's (1969:16) assertion that &amp;quot;the unit of linguistic communication is not ... the symbol, word, or sentence, ... but rather thc production or the issuance of thc symbol, word or sentence in the performance of the spcech act.&amp;quot; then wc should be able to find some formal method of characterizing speech acts in discourse. Unfortunately, linguists have too often employed speech acts as taxonomic convonicnces, as in Dora (1977). Labor and Fanshel (1977), and elscwhcre, without attempting to give anything more than a descriptive definition. Only in the atlJficial intelligencc literature, notably in the work of Allcn, Bruce, Cohcn, and Pcrrauh (e.g. Allen (1979), Bruce and Newman (1978). Cohen and Perrault (1979), Cohen (1978). Perrault, Allen, and Cohcn (1978)), does onc find an attempt to dcfinc spcech acts in terms of more gcncral processes, here specifically, opcrations on planning networks.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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