The speech act theory in a critical mirror of linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistic s

This article focuses on criticism of the speech act theory by linguistic anthropologists and conversation analysts. Author informed that discussions of speech act theory epitomize some fundamental differences between analytical philosophers and contemporary cultural and linguistic anthropologists. The article concentrates on Michelle Rosaldo's critique based on her fieldwork among the Ilongots. For Rosaldo and other linguistic anthropologists, the goal is to understand how particular uses of language might reproduce of the social order and the notion of person. Rosaldo criticized the following features of speech act theory: a) its emphasis on truth and verification; b) the centrality of intentions in its theory of interpretation; c) its implicit theory of person. From the perspective of conversational analysts, the speech act theory lacks of attention to conversational sequences. By studying the sequential nature of conversational interaction, conversation analysts have improved our ability to think about speech as the product of an interaction, expanding the context of individual speech acts studied by Austin and Searle.

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