Abstract
I consider speech act theory to be an extension of the theory of meaning in natural language. Whereas up to now the theory of meaning has almost exclusively been concerned with the meaning of strictly declarative sentences, the aim of speech act theory is to characterize the meaning of non-declarative sentences as well as declarative ones in terms of possible speech acts. As the theory of meaning includes a semantical and a pragmatical part, speech act theory deals with both aspects as well. The difference of the two aspects I consider to be as follows: semantics is concerned with the meaning of sentences in abstraction from context, pragmatics is concerned with the meaning of sentences in contexts. There is no reason to identify speech act theory in general with pragmatics of natural language, since there are kinds of speech acts that can be treated within a proper extended semantics. On the other hand, however, there are also other kinds of speech acts that must be treated by reference to special features of context, i.e. in a pragmatical way.
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Wunderlich, D. (1977). On Problems of Speech Act Theory. In: Butts, R.E., Hintikka, J. (eds) Basic Problems in Methodology and Linguistics. The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0837-1_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0837-1_15
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