“For Dagmar,” says philosopher of language John R. Searle. These two words stand out because they are on a page all of their own between the contents page and the Preface in his 1969 book, Speech Acts.¹⁹⁵ We may read around them something like, “I, the author, hereby dedicate this book to Dagmar” who may have been, we suppose, his support or inspiration. Dagmar does not have a surname, so the debt, we may also suppose, must be personal and profound.

Now, another clue, footnote 1 beside the title of a 1977 article by Searle. This takes us to the end of the text where we read: “1. I am indebted to H. Drefus and D. Searle for discussion of these matters.” “D,” we may guess, is for “Dagmar,” but this time without the whole word, so it is not a personal dedication. It is a recognition of intellectual debt, necessary it seems.¹⁹⁶

Here, in these terse statements, Searle states some requirements. He feels compelled by circumstances of life and work to acknowledge Dagmar or D. Searle. Now he compels us by way of dedication or acknowledgment to recognize his compelling. These are variants of performatives, or illocutionary acts in the terminology of his teacher at Oxford, J.L. Austin.

Austin would call what we have termed “assertion” a “locutionary act,” a statement used to describe some state of affairs, or to state a fact that might be true or false. By contrast, illocutionary acts “do things with words,” to use the title of his seminal book in a tradition of language theory that came to be known as Analytical Philosophy.

“I do,” says each partner in a marriage ceremony. “I name this ship … ” says the dignitary as they smash a bottle onto the stern on the slipway. “I give and bequeath … ” says a person anticipating death in a will. “I bet you sixpence … ” says someone wagering that something or other will happen. These are speech acts, or performatives, where the words do not just describe the world; they require that something in the surrounding action be recognized for the meaning that it has.¹⁹⁷ “I dedicate … ” or “I acknowledge … ” Searle was saying of his Dagmar/D, referring to something that surrounded his writing in an essential way.

Austin’s book, How to do Things with Words, is about these kinds of words, and by the end he classifies them into a taxonomy of requirements (to use our terminology): giving a verdict, exercising power, making promises, social behaviors such as apologizing or congratulating, and expressing a view such as affirming and denying.¹⁹⁸ To use our terminology again, this is a different species of conditionality from assertion. If assertion states the way things are, and often in ways which in the era of science tend to exaggerate their objectified thinginess, requirement refers to a chain of human action which explicitly directs the agent.

We don’t want to use “speech act” or “illocution” to name these things, because this is to give speech more credit as a focal point of meaning than it is due. The “I do” of a wedding vow is meaningless outside of the bride’s dress and the groom’s suit, the processional, the presence of a congregation, the exchange of rings, and the signing of a certificate – or some such collocation of speech with body, space, object, and gesture. If some of the congregation are unable to hear the utterance, the rest will be enough for them. We are completely dependent on multimodality and form-to-form transpositions to make a sense that we may conceptualize as the word “marriage.” And “I do” can mean many other things.

Although Austin’s analysis is of spoken words, and notwithstanding the smart title of his book, he manages to highlight the remarkable inadequacy of words of requirement. Such words rarely make sense alone. This kind of sense can only be made in a transpositional grammar, a grammar where meanings can swap out for each other, at least in part. His book is not really about doing things with words; it is about how things like requirement can’t be done with words alone, and can also be done perfectly well without them.

We need a transpositional grammar because all forms of meaning can require, without having to be connected to speech. Warning signs (a red light, for instance) and sound alerts equally communicate requirements. Requirements of this kind can happen in text too, as we saw in the case of Searle’s invocation of Dagmar/D. Written warning notices communicate requirements.

The rule of law is a series of quintessentially textual requirements – to talk like legislation or a contract would not only sound ridiculous; it can’t be done unless the text is read aloud or memorized, but this is not really speech at all. The textual requirements of law transpose into embodied reality in the form of court judgments spoken by a judge and the rigid spatial requirements of prisons. A more accurate if inelegant title for Austin’s book might have been How Spoken Words Alone Often Fail, and How to Get Things Done, With or Without Them.

Austin’s test of words that are illocutionary compared to ones that are merely locutionary comes in the peculiar ways in which illocutionary words fail to mean truly. Illocutionary speech, for Austin, can’t be correct or incorrect in the descriptive manner of locution. But it can, Austin says, be “infelicitous.”

The outcomes of a speech act can be unhappy when the expression of the speaker’s intention is in one way or another betrayed. The marriage may be a sham. The ship may be incorrectly named. The will may bequeath things that by the time of death the deceased has already disposed of. The wagerer may not honor their bet. In our terms, a requirement is communicated, but that requirement does not comport with experience, already or eventually. Dagmar/D may not have been adequately or reliably honored.

We live in a world where we are ever-alert to a requirement that may prove to be an empty promise, bad faith, deception, insincerity, dissemblance, perfunctoriness, polite avoidance, hollow praise, evasive formality, or best-but-defeated intentions – and this is just to begin a list of travesties that could become long. For every class of speech act, there can be any number of such infelicities.

In fact, infelicity may often itself be the meaning of a requirement. If the words are opaque, it may be because intentions are duplicitous and were destined to be thus. Words and other forms of requirement can by virtue of their very opacity support us in our deceptions, be these immediately conscious or unconscious self-deceptions, or merely circumstantial turns of event. The limitations in the affordances of requirement support our duplicities and missteps as to their meaning.

Searle laments that his mentor died too young, and so Austin himself was unable to extend the system of speech acts. Taking on the mantle of speech act theory, Searle presses forward. His refined, more rigorously principled classification covers: representatives (I believe, hypothesize, boast, complain); directives (I command, request, plead); commissives (I favor, undertake); expressives (I congratulate, apologize, deplore); declarations (I resign, announce, banish).¹⁹⁹ On this foundation, he goes on to develop a “calculus of speech acts,” a logical system of intention.²⁰⁰

What was that dedication to Dagmar in Searle’s book? What was the footnote of acknowledgment in his article? A representative, an expressive, a declaration? If we are to have a calculus of speech acts, the variables are slippery and for this reason, hard to classify. Transposability is more revealing than classifications that might for a moment be fixed.

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¹⁹⁵ John R. Searle, 1969, Speech Acts: An Essay on the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; also: John R. Searle, 1995, The Construction of Social Reality, New York, NY: Free Press.

¹⁹⁶ John R. Searle, 1977, “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida,” Glyph:198–208, p. 208.

¹⁹⁷ J.L. Austin, 1962 [1975], How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 1–5, passim.

¹⁹⁸ Ibid., pp. 151–64.

¹⁹⁹ John R. Searle, 1975, “A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts,” Language, Mind, and Knowledge 7:344–69, pp. 354–61.

²⁰⁰ John R. Searle and Daniel Vanderveken, 1985, Foundations of Illocutionary Logic, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, p. 27.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 243–246. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

J.L. Austin’s "How to Do Things with Words" §MS2.3.1a