Brief Notes from John Lyons, "Language, Meaning and Context" (Pages 172-174)

Background to This Book: The linguist Sir John Lyons lived between 23 May 1932 – 12 March 2020 and he was a Fellow of the British Academy. His concentration was semantics: his peers considered him to be a "major semanticist" (Clark and Kempson). Out of the major work he did, one important study was Language, Meaning and Context, published in 1981. This book was written to outline and critique the status quo of semantics at the time. Since the field of linguistics has a significant impact on theology and speech act theory plays a role in contemporary theology, I want to comment briefly on this subject with help from the book by Lyons. 

On page 172, Lyons makes it clear that he does not truly like the terminology, "speech acts," so when he analyzes John Austin's inchoate theory of performative utterances, Lyons introduces personally-crafted distinctions while adhering somewhat closely to Austin's terminology the best that he can. Austin's famed work was How to Do Things With Words published in 1962. He lectured at Oxford and set forth thought-provoking ideas, but Austin did not leave an organized manuscript that his peers could publish. The lack of a suitable manuscript led to the imprecise articulation of his speech act theory, which John Searle later studied, propagated, and then offered his own ideas. 

On page 174, Lyons relates that Austin's theory was born in the midst of verificationist controversies: that is, some philosophers and linguists suggested that theological, metaphysical, moral, and aesthetic statements are emotive rather than communicators of truth or falsity. This would include statements like "Murder is wrong" and "Joe is a better singer than Barry." Austin criticized the verificationists and came up with his own counterexamples like "I promise to pay you five pounds on Tuesday." This statement is neither true nor false, but evidently obligates the one uttering the words to keep his/her promise or to act in a certain way. Hence, the terminology, "speech acts" (performative utterances). Linguists commonly articulate this theory in terms of the categories, locution, illocution, and perlocution. Kevin Vanhoozer has utilized speech act theory to explicate his theological thought. I also recommend Lyons' book if one wants to learn more about speech act theory, deixis/indexicality, semantics in general, Gricean implicature theory and much more. 

Sources: Lyons, John (1981). Language, Meaning and Context. Fontana.

https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/2738/19-Memoirs-19-Lyons.pdf