Speech act theory and Gricean pragmatics: A review

Abstract

This paper entitled “Speech Act Theory and Gricean Pragmatics: A Review” appreciates the language of action words since pragmatic strategies are applied in order to bring out features of speeches. Pragmatic strategies such as entailment, presupposition, implicatures, context of situation, speech acts among others were used in this paper. The paper is also anchored on the pragmatic theory which is a speech act theory. This theory deals with utterances and how they are used to express actions. The examples used in this study were utterances used by some scholars in their research work and some extemporaneous examples given by the authors of this paper. These utterances served as our data in this paper. The study concludes that speech act captures an action performed by someone through his words. Also the central aspect of the Speech Act Theory is that an utterance is part of an action within the framework of social institution and conventions. J. L. Austin proposed three levels of speech acts: locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act which were dissected in this paper.