Cheers, Ken Hanly
Here is a summary of Austin's position on phatic acts: HDTW = "How to Do Things with Words" by Austin..
Before considering the phatic act I should remark that, whereas phones are just noises, phonemes are the sound-units of a particular language. So we must not take Austin to be distinguishing between phonemic and non-phonemic noises at the level of the phonetic act. His 'phone' is not yet a phoneme. Although Austin does not say this, what he goes on to say, as we shall see, calls for this. It is at the phatic level then that actual languages are first considered. Here one utters certain vocables or words, i.e. noises of certain types belonging to and as belonging to a certain vocabulary, in a certain construction, i.e. conforming to and as conforming to a certain grammar, with a certain intonation, &c [HDTW, 92]. Here the phones become phonemes, which intentionally express words from the lexicon of a certain language, and are intentionally produced in an order prescribed by the syntactic rules of that language. The phones are produced as conforming to the phonemic, lexical and syntactic conventions of a certain language. I take it that this does not mean that the phemes (as the results of phatic acts are called) are always well pronounced or well formed sentences. One does not cease to speak a language if one mispronounces words within certain limits (for instance, native English speakers do not fail to speak Russian merely because they cannot roll, or trill, their r's). [14] Also, one does not cease to speak a language if one makes certain syntactic errors, again within certain limits (such as, for instance, 'If I would have been there, I would have seen it'). These limits would probably be determined by the ability of another speaker of the language either mentally to correct the mistake or to get the intended sense in spite of the mistake. [15]
To pass from the phonetic act to the phatic act one must have certain intentions conforming to certain conventions: one must intend one's phones to express utterances that conform to the conventions of a certain language. The monkey that produces phones indistinguishable from those that the English speaker produces when he says 'go' does not say the word 'go' because he did not intend his phonetic act to conform to the conventions of English. His act is not an intentional act in accordance with conventions [HDTW, 96].
To show that merely uttering phones is not the same as uttering phonemes, words and phrases, consider the following example of Austin's. One is asked the following trick question: 'If cold water is iced water, what is cold ink?' One responds: 'Iced ink'. [16] Here one intentionally produces the phonemes /ist'ink/ but the phones one produced could also be interpreted as the phonemes /i'stink/ although they were not intended as such. Or, since Austin does not speak in terms of phonemes, one would have uttered the phones that go to make up the utterance of 'I stink' but one would not have uttered those words since one had not that intention as the context makes clear, the relevant context here being the fact that one was asked about iced liquids. This shows the importance of context of utterance: it is context, including the speaker's intentions (i.e. 'total' context), that determines which phatic act the phonetic act gives rise to
----- Original Message ----- From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2001 6:56 PM Subject: Re: Ethical foundations of the left
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>
> Kenneth MacKendrick wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > Habermas is a philosopher and sociologist. He providing a theoretical
> > analysis of communication.
> >
>
> It doesn't seem to me that communication is sufficiently abstractable
> from the conditions in which it occurs to be the object of a separate
> discipline. There can be a theory of social relations, which will
> implicitly incorporate analysis of communication, but "theory of
> communication" is incoherent.
>
> How would you apply your analysis to phatic speech? (And note, one of
> the deficiencies of e-list communication seems to be that e-mail
> suppresses all evidence of phatic speech. It simply doesn't exist in
> cyberspace! And yet it is probably the most important use of speech.
>
> Carrol