Illocutionary speech acts

An illocutionary speech act is one where you're speaking for some other purpose than directly communicating the content of what you're saying. A lot of etiquette rules, for instance, concern illocutionary speech acts made to signal goodwill, noninterference, or other markers of compliance with affective traffic rules (?? ????).

Interesting subtypes abound:

A perlocutionary speech act is one where you are trying to cause the listener to do something by speaking. Encouragement, discouragement, appeals to reason, sense, or empathy, status-game utterances, or even saying "I'm hungry" in hopes that someone will give you a snack or hurry the start of dinner, are all perlocutionary acts.

A performative speech act is one that directly changes something by its utterance. Examples include legal pronouncements, promises and oaths, statements about a relationship status (for e.g. saying "we're not friends" as a way to directly make it true), bets.

Foundations work in describing how illocutionary speech acts work is a fun hotbed of postmodern philosophy. Notably:

• do you need to care about the context of an utternace, or is that contained in there already?
• is language "animated by a speaker" or is it "alive in its own right"?
• who controls what can be said in the first place, and how did they exert that control? (probably by saying something about it, right?)
• expressivity describes what kinds of meaning a language can support, which can mean several things.
  • Lexical: can the symbols available in that language support definable concepts? i.e. does the shape of the stuff being described gel with the shapes the langauge tends to take?
  • Locutionary: can utternaces in the language convery lexical meaning easily between speaker and listeners? Examples of poor design in this space would be sentences too long to fit in working memory or tyhe audio loop, or morphemes that are too near each other and lead to conflicting interpretations.
  • Perlocutionary: do utterance in the language ten to affect people in ways that align with a speaker's intention? Do words about beauty sound beautiful, do sad utterances seem sad?
  • Performative: does reality obey the speech? what is the mechanism by which it does this, and how powerfula nd how fragile is it?