Bach and Harnish’s Speech Act Theory; Towards an Appraisal

Abstract

This study is an appraisal of Bach and Harnish’s (1979) speech act theory, which portrays language use as a fascinating speaker-hearer phenomenon. Like Grice’s pragmatic theory (cf. Grice 1975), Bach and Harnish’s (ibid) speech act theory contends that language use is a rational communicative behaviour on the part of the participants. Speech act theories are immersed in the appropriateness of speech acts in discrete contexts and situations. Hence, the term ‘congruence’ refers to how a speaker’s speech act or utterance matches his/her addressee’s social status. In critiquing or appraising Bach and Harnish’s (ibid) speech act theory, this study brings to the fore, its strengths and weaknesses, as they apply not only to different dimensions of language use, but also in terms of features of human communication captured in the literature. Hinging on Charles Kriedler’s language-speaker postulations, this study concludes that while Bach and Harnish’s speech act theory is suitable for understanding speech acts in relation to shared knowledge, literal and non-literal propositions, the theory does not satisfactorily account for certain dimensions of human communication beyond the sentence.