LES THEORIES DES ACTES DE LANGAGES D'AUSTIN ET DE SEARLE : FONDEMENTS POUR UNE ANALYSE

When speaking we do something, we talk with intent and for someone. Speech is a social phenomenon and, to realize our communicative intentions, we are supposed to observe linguistic and socio-cultural conventions (constitutive rules, norms of use or procedural rules). As a social act, governed by rules, the act of speech becomes the object of the theory put in place by Austin, Searle and their followers. In its classical variant, the theory of speech acts seems to be a theory of isolated acts "basic minimal units of linguistic communication" (Searle, 1969/1972, p. 59). Within this work, we will make some considerations on the theorization of the speech act proposed by Austin and extended by Searle. Critics of Austin's theory contest the abandonment of the opposition between constatives and performatives, the weakness of the grammatical criteria imposed on performatives and the typology of illocutionary values. The Searlian theory of speech acts gives rise to some discussion, essentially on the principle of expressiveness, conventional rules, the taxonomy of illocutionary acts, indirect speech acts.