Interest. In any situation, people have different interests, and worry about different things. Therefore, the speech acts used in situations ought to reflect these interests and worries, e.g. condolences and congratulations (i.e. it would be inappropriate to congratulate somebody who has just lost a close relative).
7. Discourse-related functions. These refer to the context in which speech acts are being uttered, so that they may be ‘taken up’ correctly in relation to their function.
8. Content. This criterion enables us to separate out speech acts in accordance with what they are ‘about’: for example, in the dimension of time, past events cannot be used for predictions, only for statements and narrative acts.
9. Speech acts or speech act verbs. These concern differences between those acts that must always be speech acts, and those that might be, but need not be speech acts. In the case of ordering, an order need not be expressed by a speech act verb of ordering; but when it comes to institutionalized speech acts, the situation is different, a particular speech act verb is usually obligatory.
10. Social institutions and speech acts. These refer to dissimilarities between those acts that need extra-linguistic institutions for their performance and those that do not; e.g. blessing or excommunicating require a position within an extralinguistic institution, whereas there is no need for such extra-linguistic institutions when making a statement or promising.
11. Speech acts and performatives. Only certain speech acts can be said to have a performative character, i.e. the property of doing what they explicitly say. Not all illocutionary verbs are expressed by performative verbs, e.g. boasting, threatening.
12. Style. This criterion consists in the difference in the style of the illocutionary act.
Most people claim that the way we say things is often more important than the contents of what is being said.
The twelve criteria discussed above aim at laying the groundwork for a better classification procedure. Searle, while allowing that there is a myriad of language particular speech acts proposed that all acts fall into five main categories:
1. Assertives– which commit the Speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition (paradigm cases: asserting, concluding, etc).
2. Directives – which are attempts by the Speaker to get the addressee to do something (paradigm cases: ordering, requesting, questioning).
3. Commissives– which commit the Speaker to some future course of action (paradigm cases: promising, threatening, offering).
4. Expressives – which express a psychological state, the attitude or feelings of the Speaker (paradigm cases: thanking, apologizing, welcoming, congratulating).
5. Declarations– which effect immediate changes in the institutional state of affairs and which tend to rely on elaborate extra-linguistic institutions (paradigm cases: excommunicating, declaring war, christening, marrying, firing from employment).
In distinguishing these acts, Searle further developed Austin’s notion of FCs into a classification of conditions that must hold for a successful speech act. Searle distinguishes between propositional, preparatory, sincerity and essential conditions for an act. In a nutshell, we can describe them in the following way:
content conditions define the type of meaning expressed by the propositional part of an utterance.
2. Preparatory conditions specify prerequisites to the performance of the speech act.
3. Sincerity conditions are obligatory for the speech act to be performed sincerely.
4. Essential conditions clarify what the speech act must ‘count as’.
Request Propositional content – Future act A of H.
Preparatory – H is able to do A. S believes H is able to do A.
It is not obvious to both S and H that H will do A in the normal course of events of his own accord.
Sincerity – S wants H to do A.
Essential – Counts as an attempt to get H to do A.
where: H = Hearer
S = Speaker
A = future action
Searle appears to be right in criticizing Austin for the deficiencies in his classification schema. To illustrate, the categories that Austin establishes are not mutually exclusive, as their criteria often overlap. There seems to be a rather general confusion between the notion of ‘speech acts’ and that of ‘speech act verbs’ in Austin’s work. As noted by Mey, “Searle is unhappy about the fact that Austin apparently does not see that there is a difference between speech acts and speech act verbs”.
When evaluating Searle’s classification of speech acts, we notice that in many respects it resembles Austin’s. In addition, Searle devoted a lot of attention to all the different criteria that one could employ to establish a coherent and consistent taxonomy. Searle’s taxonomy “is more oriented towards the real world” and centres on the illocutionary aspects of language use. Within this system, Searle addressed possible intentions of speakers and also the desired actions of the utterances applying to various situations.
Other scholars have suggested alternative classifications and different typologies, either trying to expand on or disagree with Searle’s. They maintain that there are different levels of Speech Acts and that the classifications are not as easy to identify as is suggested by Searle. They argue that it would be almost impossible to classify each and every utterance employing only the five types of speech act mentioned above.