Reflections on the Intentionality of Linguistic Behavior

Abstract

The precise role of human intentions (in the narrow sense of the aims and goals of an acting person) in verbal action, or in action in general, remains a contested issue in the present-day linguistic (or, more generally, human) sciences. In many branches of language research (especially the cognitively oriented ones) and language philosophy (in particular the Anglo-American tradition), there is a strong (though often implicit) tendency to take it for granted that intentions are the single most important notion for any theory of the ‘genesis’ (or the ‘causes’) of human (linguistic) behavior. A prototypical view — and a very explicit one — in this direction is Searle’s (1969, 1983) theory of (originally) speech acts and (in later development) human Intentionality (which is of course the product of an older tradition in which Grice has been one of the main sources of inspiration — cf. Grice 1989). However, this view that intentions are the crux of human action has also been criticized — in particular also with respect to Searle’s theory of speech acts — as being too limited, or even wrong, mainly by more socio- and ethnolinguistically oriented scholars.