Action and intention

One theme of the last several chapters has been that to utter, or produce any linguistic token, is to do something. In Malinowski's words, it is ‘a mode of action’. In considering the prayer in chapter eight we claimed that the text was an activity. We argued that the words ‘we pray thee’ performed the act of entreating or performing a humble request. It has been a fundamental assumption of pragmatics that utterances are a form of human action (Levinson, 1983: 226). To say something is similar to performing many other types of actions; for example, opening a window, mailing a letter, hitting a ball with a cricket bat, beckoning to someone, and so on. Speech acts have their own particular characteristics but also share certain important properties with other types of non-verbal action.

Let us examine two such properties. The first property was described by the philosopher G. E. M. Anscombe in her book Intention (1957).