Illocutionary Force
Illocutionary force is the communicative intention behind an utterance — what the speaker means to accomplish by saying something. The concept originates in J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words (1962) and was systematised by John Searle (1969, 1976).
Austin's Three-Level Analysis
Austin distinguished three simultaneous acts performed in every utterance:
| Act | What it is | Example: "It's cold in here" |
|---|---|---|
| Locutionary | The act of saying something with a determinate sense and reference | A statement about the temperature |
| Illocutionary | The act performed in saying something — the intended communicative function | A request to close the window |
| Perlocutionary | The effect achieved by saying something — the actual impact on the hearer | The hearer closes the window (or ignores the hint) |
Illocutionary force is the middle layer: it captures the speaker's intention, which may or may not match the literal (locutionary) meaning and may or may not achieve its desired (perlocutionary) effect.
Searle's Classification
Searle (1976) classified illocutionary acts into five categories:
- Representatives/assertives — committing to the truth of a proposition (The test is on Friday)
- Directives — attempting to get the hearer to do something (Could you open the window?)
- Commissives — committing the speaker to a future action (I'll mark your essays by Monday)
- Expressives — expressing a psychological state (I'm sorry about the confusion)
- Declarations — changing the state of the world by utterance (You're expelled)
Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices (IFIDs)
Speakers signal illocutionary force through:
- Performative verbs — I promise, I warn, I apologise
- Word order — interrogative inversion signals a question
- Intonation — rising pitch may signal a question or uncertainty
- Modals and hedges — Could you..., Would you mind...
- Context — the same sentence carries different force in different situations
Relevance to ELT
Understanding illocutionary force is central to teaching Pragmatics and Speech Acts:
- Learners often produce utterances with unintended illocutionary force — saying You must come to my party (intended as invitation) when it sounds like a command
- Indirect speech acts (where form and force diverge) are a major source of cross-cultural miscommunication: Can you pass the salt? is formally a question about ability but functionally a request
- Teaching language functions (requesting, apologising, suggesting) is essentially teaching learners to produce and recognise appropriate illocutionary force
The gap between locutionary meaning and illocutionary force is where Implicature operates — hearers must infer what speakers intend beyond what they literally say.
Key References
- Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Clarendon Press.
- Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press.
- Searle, J. R. (1976). A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society, 5(1), 1–23.