Studies In Searle’s Theory Of Speech Acts

John Rogers Searle is a famous contemporary analytic philosopher of America, histheory of speech acts is the important part of philosophy of language. In Searle’s opinion, theminimum unit of language communication is some kind of speech acts of completion. Heamended Austin’s original classification analysis for speech acts, proposed a moresophisticated classification, which was utterance act, propositional act, illocutionary act andperlocutionary act. In such a basis, he focused on analysis of illocutionary act, and thenproposed12classification criteria. He strongly regarded that the constitutive rules of verbalcommunication should be observed. Searle explored the concept of indirect speech acts whichmentioned in the theory of conversational implicature by Paul Grice, then elaborated his owntheory, the indirect speech acts. On promoting development pragmatics, he linked meaningwhich is the core issue of philosophy of language and speech acts to investigation. At thesame time, Searle emphasized the close relation on philosophy of language and mind, evenconsidered the philosophy of language as part of the philosophy of mind, which provided anew direction for the development of philosophy of language, widen the edge of research onit. With the deepening of research on the theory of speech acts, Searle established the"illocutionary logic" which has the symbolic meaning for the logic of natural languagedevelopment.