On speech acts of commitment in English

Speech acts of commitment have been recognized since the early days of speech act theory as being a well-defined subset (Austin, 1962: 157ff.) and have been the object of attention, at least in the formal sense of specifying precondition and contexts for their occurrence and success (Searle, 1969: 57ff.). Commitment is a quite wide-ranging phenomenon and the narrower act of promising should be seen in this broader context. Furthermore its expression can take on a variety of linguistic manifestations. It is these facts which have led to the present article. What I wish to treat then are the following: (i) the nature of verbal commitment, the form it takes as a speech act and the specific manifestations of it in English, (ii) an analysis of the felicity conditions under which these acts can be successful and (iii) the relation of speech acts as commitment to other types of speech acts. I will not of course manage to handle these three areas as a sequence of three separate phenomena. Indeed this would, if it were possible, be a distortion of reality for these areas are not self-enclosed but co-occur, that is the manifestation of a speech act of commitment (as any other type for that matter) is dependent on a variety of linguistic factors and extra-linguistic accompanying circumstances which co-occur and interact simultaneously. The core of the speech acts to be looked at here are formed by a performative verb with perlocutionary force. Thus they are different form a sentence such as