Elements of a Plan‐Based Theory of Speech Acts*

TLDR

Speech acts are conceptualized as planning operators that integrate verbal and physical actions, reflecting the common intuition that people consider the impact of their words. The study proposes that people plan speech acts to influence listeners' beliefs, goals, and emotions in pursuit of their own objectives. The authors define requesting and informing operators, construct plans using them, and compare the resulting framework with Searle's formulation. Refining the operator definitions and accounting for side effects resolves compositional shortcomings, enabling questions and multiparty requests and yielding a metatheoretical principle for modeling speech acts as planning operators.

Abstract

This paper explores the truism hat people think about what hey say. It proposes that, to satisfy heir own goals, people often plan their speech acts to affect their listeners' beliefs, goals, and emotional states. Such language use can be modelled by viewing speech acts as operators in a planning system, thus allowing both physical and speech acts to be integrated into plans. Methodological issues of how speech acts should be defined in a plan‐based theory are illustrated by defining operators for requesting and informing. Plans containing those operators are presented and comparisons are drawn with Searle's formulation. The operators are show to be inadequate since they cannot be composed to form questions (requests to inform) and multiparty requests (requests to request). By refining the operator definitions and by identifying some of the side effects of requesting, compositional adequacy is achieved. The solution leads to a metatheoretical principle for modelling speech acts as planning operators.