This document discusses felicity conditions in speech acts. [1] Felicity conditions refer to the conditions that must be met for a speech act to achieve its intended goal. [2] There are three main felicity conditions according to Austin: the people and circumstances must be appropriate, the act must be executed correctly by all participants, and the participants must have the appropriate intentions. [3] Felicity conditions have advantages like helping understand implied meanings, but also weaknesses such as indirect speech acts sometimes being difficult to interpret.
This document discusses felicity conditions in speech acts. [1] Felicity conditions refer to the conditions that must be met for a speech act to achieve its intended goal. [2] There are three main felicity conditions according to Austin: the people and circumstances must be appropriate, the act must be executed correctly by all participants, and the participants must have the appropriate intentions. [3] Felicity conditions have advantages like helping understand implied meanings, but also weaknesses such as indirect speech acts sometimes being difficult to interpret.
This document discusses felicity conditions in speech acts. [1] Felicity conditions refer to the conditions that must be met for a speech act to achieve its intended goal. [2] There are three main felicity conditions according to Austin: the people and circumstances must be appropriate, the act must be executed correctly by all participants, and the participants must have the appropriate intentions. [3] Felicity conditions have advantages like helping understand implied meanings, but also weaknesses such as indirect speech acts sometimes being difficult to interpret.
This document discusses felicity conditions in speech acts. [1] Felicity conditions refer to the conditions that must be met for a speech act to achieve its intended goal. [2] There are three main felicity conditions according to Austin: the people and circumstances must be appropriate, the act must be executed correctly by all participants, and the participants must have the appropriate intentions. [3] Felicity conditions have advantages like helping understand implied meanings, but also weaknesses such as indirect speech acts sometimes being difficult to interpret.
Definition, Functions, Strengths and Weaknesses in Felicity
Condition In pragmatic studies there is a theory of speech acts in which the term felicity condition refers to the conditions that must exist and the criteria that must be met in order for the act to achieve the goal. A sentence must not only be grammatical to be done correctly, it must also be precise or fit for purpose. Felicity condition refers to the effectiveness of using speaker's speech acts. Austin (1962), said that in using speech acts a person must meet certain conditions regarding the actions spoken. For example, when a person makes a promise to another person, he or she must satisfy the condition that the listener or the promisee has a need for something to be promised, and the speaker or promise giver will have the intention to fulfill that. Therefore the act of promising would be valid to be considered a favorable condition. By definition, the condition of felicity is a condition when the utterance made has met the appropriate conditions such as, appropriate context, conventional existence, authority, and the sincerity of the speaker. In this essay, the author will discuss more deeply about the function of felicity conditions for speech acts with examples of felicity conditions in illocutionary acts, as well as the weaknesses and strengths of speech acts. The Felicity condition plays a very important role in speech acts when someone wants to speak. Because of this, the spoken sentence must pass filtering or word sorting so that the propriety of the sentence spoken reaches its goal. According to Austin (1962), there are 3 conditions so that performative speech can be carried out (felicity conditions), namely: 1. The persons and circumstances must be appropriate, for example the speech that is often conveyed to the bride and groom "I declare the brothers as husband and wife" only can be fulfilled if the person who utters the utterance is someone who is authorized to utter the utterance., 2. The act must be executed completely and correctly executed by all participants, for example, a leader who says “you are absolutely wrong” to his subordinates but does not being able to point out the error or what rules make it considered wrong is an invalid speech., 3. The participants must have the appropriate intentions, for example the speech "I'II see you on the office at there", whereas actually at three o'clock the speaker did not hold another promise with a certain party, then the speech is invalid. In essence, all utterances contain the meaning of action, and not only speech that has performative verbs. Each theory has advantages and disadvantages, as for the advantages in this felicity condition as has been conveyed by (Paltridge, 2000: 18) that speech acts have a unique way of expressing speech acts from a linguistic point of view. Speech acts are divided into assertive, directive, commissive, expressive and declarative. Usually we use the interrogative form to seek or get information/something. declarative form to make a statement or convey information, imperative form to tell someone to do something. Felicity condition in speech acts also has advantages as an approach that tries to formulate how knowledge is brought into the game. For example, when someone doesn't have a topic of conversation when they're on a first date and the atmosphere starts to get quiet, then one of the couples asks "What time is it? It seems it's late at night", this is to attract the other person's attention to go home or start looking. new topic of conversation. In addition, Felicity condition also helps to understand the unspoken aspects of what people say, direct and indirect speech activities. In this case listeners are able to understand indirect speech acts by relying on their knowledge of speech acts. This implies that when we have the concept of speech acts, we can understand the unspoken components of what someone said and meant. For example, there is an athlete who says to his coach "I'm tired" what the athlete means is that he wants to ask his coach to rest. The weakness of Felicity condition in speech act as well as interpreting the meaning of speech act is not easy but also not difficult. For example, when a couple is climbing a mountain, suddenly the woman says to the man, "The trail is very steep." Here, in fact, the woman wants to rest for a while or also wants to be carried by a man. In addition, another weakness is as Paltridge, 2000, said that indirect speech acts are sometimes difficult to detect for second language learners because they are not always familiar with them in English. For example, I am an english learner, where english is my sec language. One of my English friends said "can you carry my bag?", then I replied "no, I can't". Here I don't want to refuse my friend's request. I thought that my friend left her heavy bag, but my friend intended to help her carry a small bag containing some things. Speech acts are something that is important in language life, so humans need to know the concept of speech acts and also the conditions that must be met to achieve speech acts called the condition of felicity. The term felicity condition refers to the conditions that must exist and the criteria that must be met in order for the speech act to achieve its goal. Speech acts have several advantages, including speech acts that have a unique way of expressing, have several functions which are to facilitate communication, and finally speech acts have a special concept to be understood by people. Apart from that, it also has weaknesses, including interpreting meanings that are not easy and not difficult, indirect speech acts are difficult to detect and the last speech acts form another system. Therefore, we must understand the concept of felicity condition and speech act to communicate properly according to the structure, content and context.
References:
Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge-Mass: Harvard
University Press.
Paltridge, B. 2000. Making Sense of Discourse Analysis. Gold Coast: Antipodean
Definition and Explanation (speech acts). (2018, January 4). Retrieved March 15, 2022, from https://culturalstudiesnow.blogspot.com/2018/01/felicity-condition- definition-and.html Nordquist, R. (n.d.). Kondisi Felicity (bicara). Kondisi Felicity - Definisi dan Contoh. Retrieved March 15, 2022, from https://id.eferrit.com/kondisi-felicity- bicara/
Kondisi Felicity Dalam Teori speech-act. (2019, May 30). Retrieved March 15, 2022, from https://www.greelane.com/id/sastra/inggris/felicity-conditions-speech- 1690855/#:~:text=Dalam%20pragmatik%20(studi%20tentang%20bagaimana,aga r%20tindak%20tutur%20mencapai%20tujuannya
