speech directions definition

Types of Directions

Following directions is an important life skill. There are many types of directions and they are everywhere . They are in the classroom, like when the teacher says, ‘sit down at your desk’ or ‘get out your book and turn to page 6.’ Directions are at home too. For example, when the caregiver says, ‘go get your shoes’ or ‘set the table for dinner.’

The first two types of directions are verbal vs. written. They mean exactly what you think. Written directions are given in writing (i.e., reading directions to a board game, reading a recipe). Verbal directions are given verbally (i.e., a teacher telling students instructions to complete an assignment, a caregiver telling a child to clean their room).

The next two types of directions are simple vs. complex. Simple directions are basic, one-step directions with one element. For example, ‘point to the ball’ or ‘show me the shoe.’ Adding steps or elements increases the complexity of a given direction. Life is full of complex directions. Unfortunately, many people give directions that are difficult to follow without even realizing it. We have all had that teacher that never stopped talking to give us enough time to complete the instructions given.

Let’s discuss the steps and elements further.

Directions can range from 1 to 3 steps. Multi-step directions involve following two or more steps at a time. There can certainly be more than 3 steps to a direction, but I personally don’t work on more than 3 step directions. My reasoning- most people struggle to remember and follow more than 3 steps at a time.

In addition to steps, there are elements that can be added. For example, pick up the red ball is one step, but you are adding a qualifying element of red to the object ball.

Sequential – Adding a specific order (first, second, third, then, last) as in ‘first point to your knee, then point to the ceiling’

Spatial – Adding location to the direction (i.e., under, above, next to, between) as in ‘point to the car under the chair’

Temporal – Adding terms that refer to time (i.e., before, after, in between) as in ‘touch your head before you touch your ears’

Quantitative – Adding numbers (i.e., one, two, three) as in ‘clap three times’

Conditional – Adding in certain conditions (i.e., if/then) as in ‘if there are three chairs, touch your nose, if not, count to three’

Qualitative – Adding descriptive elements (i.e., color, size, shape) as in ‘point to the big red ball’

You can see that these elements overlap, like sequential and temporal. The key difference between sequential and temporal directions is that sequential directions follow an order and temporal directions relate to time.

Following directions is a common goal for receptive language skills. Below are how I write my goals.

Johnny will independently follow <#> step basic directions given verbally in 8/10 trials across 3 consecutive sessions.

Susie will independently follow <#> step sequential directions given verbally in 8/10 trials across 3 consecutive sessions.

Raymond will independently follow <#> step directions given verbally containing qualitative, quantitative, spatial, or temporal concepts in 8/10 trials across 3 consecutive sessions.

What are common classroom directions given? Let us know in the comments below?

Following Directions in Speech Therapy

Updated: Oct 30, 2020

The ability to follow directions is often worked on in speech therapy. Children are asked to follow directions in their everyday lives. In order to follow directions, the child requires a strong knowledge of basic concepts and the ability to process and retain auditory information.

From the time they are babies, we give children clues when we speak such as pointing, looking at an object and gesturing to help them to understand . Children learn a lot of vocabulary this way.

However, if we are trying to ascertain whether or not a child understands certain vocabulary or concepts, we need to be really careful not to give them any clues so that we know they are understanding the words we are saying. We also need to note the number of information carrying words.

What Is An Information-Carrying Word?

The concept of ”Information Carrying Words’ is one that is used frequently by Speech and Language Therapists in the UK but less commonly used in the US and Australia. The term was originally used by Knowles and Masidlover (1978) and forms the basis for the Derbyshire Language Scheme, an intervention programme for children with delayed language development.

The number of information carrying words in a sentence is not the total number of words but rather the number of words in the sentence that a child needs to understand in order to follow an instruction.

0 information-carrying words

An example of a sentence with 0 information carrying words would be if a parent held up their child’s coat and said “Put on your coat”. The child could tell from the context what they are being asked to do and would not be required to understand the word ‘coat’.

For a word to be an information-carrying word, there therefore must be an alternative choice and there must not be any clues from context such as gesture, looking at the object or copying what others are doing.

1 information-carrying word

The sentence “Which one is pink?” has four words but only one information-carrying word. The words “which one is” become redundant and the child only needs to understand the word “pink” to carry out the instruction.

In order to check that the child understands the word “pink” an alternative choice must be given e.g a choice of a blue sock and a pink sock as pictured above.

2 information-carrying words

‘Touch the blue mug’ has 2 information-carrying words if there is the choice of 2 mugs of different colours and another object in 2 different colours.

The child now has to understand the word ‘mug’ and the word ‘blue’ in order to correctly follow the instruction.

3 information-carrying words

‘Touch the small pink mug’ is a 3 information-carrying word sentence if there is the choice of mugs and another object of different colours and sizes. The child has to understand the word ‘small,’ the word ‘pink’ and the word ‘mug’ in order to correctly follow the instruction.

How many information-carrying words should a child understand?

As a child’s language develops, they are able to understand more information in a sentence or instruction. The number of information-carrying words that a child can understand is a good indicator of what stage they are at in their language development.

You can work on following commands of varying information-carrying word/keyword length by using real objects or pictures on a table or within the format of a game. Using objects can be time-consuming as you need to arrange the objects on the table, ensuring you have a choice of objects and concepts (e.g. different sizes, colours) for each instruction that you give. You also need to spend time tallying which can take away from the task.

This is where an app can be of huge benefit as it allows for a wide variety of instructions and automatic tallying of results. It is also very fun and motivating for the child. The Keyword Understanding app gives alternative choices at each graded level to check understanding of information-carrying words.

Comprehension Check

As Keyword Understanding uses a variety of objects, and the concepts of size (small, big) and colours (red, yellow, green, blue, pink), it is important to first check the child’s understanding of these items at the 1 information carrying-word level, before proceeding to a higher information-carrying word level. You can do this in the Comprehension Check component of the app. At higher information-carrying word levels, there is an increased auditory processing and memory load.

Object Size & Colour - Information-Carrying Words

Keyword Understanding includes graded tasks of increasing difficulty (2-6 information carrying words). These can be spoken instructions only, written instructions only or both.

An example following directions activity in the Keyword Understanding app

2 Keyword Level: Touch the pink bag

3 Keyword Level: Touch the small pink glasses

4 Keyword Level: Touch the green bucket and the yellow book

6 Keyword Level: Touch the small green phone and the big red glasses

Before & After - Temporal Directions

Keyword Understanding also includes Temporal Directions tasks which target the child ability to follow directions which include the words before/after at the start and/or in the middle of the sentence.

A temporal directions (before/after) activity in the Keyword Understanding speech therapy app.

Before you touch the umbrella, touch the butterfly

After you touch the lamp, touch the vase

Touch the brick after you touch the bucket

Touch the balloon before you touch the flower

Keyword Understanding is available for download on the iTunes App Store.

Pediatric SLP
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Following Directions

In Following Directions, learners acquire the understanding that directions given to the full group applies themselves even if their name wasn’t used. They learn strategies to remember multi-step directions and are exposed to the value of following the direction the first time it’s given.

Preview an SEL skills lesson: Following Directions

[INTRODUCTION. Animated scene – teacher and students working individually at their desks]

Narrator: Teachers give their class directions all day long. The directions often have a few steps.

Teacher: (gives instructions to students)Before you line up, worksheets go in the bin on my desk and all books should go on the shelf.

Narrator: Everyone in the class should follow the directions by themselves without needing help or reminders from the teacher. Make sure you’re paying attention anytime the teacher talks so you don’t miss a direction. First, we notice when the teacher is giving the entire class a direction. Boy1: (looks at teacher)

Narrator: Next, focus on the key words so you don’t have to remember so many.

Boy1: (directions steps breakdown: 1. Worksheets in bin 2. Books on the shelf 3. Line up)

Narrator: Then, repeat the key steps to yourself one or two times.

Boy1: (directions steps breakdown review)

Narrator: Get going right away on the first step. It’s never a good habit to avoid work.

Boy1: (puts worksheet in bin at teacher’s desk)

Narrator: Check that you’re done before you move on to the next step. This is just a quick glance to make sure you didn’t forget something.

Boy1: (puts book on shelf)

Narrator: Move through each step and make sure all steps are done before you put materials away or clean up.

Boy1: (line up)

Narrator: Being able to follow directions yourself can make you feel proud of yourself, and your teacher will be proud of you.

Boy1: (proud emotion)

Narrator: Let’s review. To follow directions without reminders:

Notice when our teacher is talking to the class and listen to the directions.

Focus on just the key words in the directions.

Repeat the key words in your head.

Think about what you need to do first.

Check that you’re done with one step before moving on. It’s smart to look around at others if you aren’t sure what to do.

Let’s see Shay learn to follow directions.

[SCENE 1 – students are sitting at their desks]

Teacher: Okay, I need everyone’s attention for a minute.

Students: (looks to direction of the teacher)

Shay: (distracted)

Teacher: You guys are going to first check that your lead sentence is copied from your organizer. Then, check that you have dialogue in your paragraph. And last, you need quotation marks around your dialogue.

Students: (working on instructions)

Shay: (fiddling with pencil)

Teacher: (checking student’s works, approaches Shay and notices he isn’t working) Shay, why haven’t you gotten started? You haven’t written anything.

Shay: I forgot the first direction so I couldn’t get started.

Teacher: Sitting doing nothing is not an option. I’m really disappointed in you.

Narrator: What happened there? Shay wasn’t able to follow the directions, so he never started his work. Let’s see what they’re both thinking.

Shay: (thought bubble) I couldn’t remember the directions, so I panicked.

Teacher: (thought bubble) If Shay can’t follow the directions, I have to help him with every single step. That takes a lot of time away from the other students.

Narrator: Shay felt embarrassed that he forgot the directions, and his teacher was disappointed in him. If he had repeated the steps in his head, he would have remembered them and been able to do his work. Let’s watch him try again.

Shay: (directions steps breakdown) Copy lead sentence, check for dialogue, check for quotes. Those are actually three small steps. First, I need to copy the lead sentence. (starts working)

Shay: and… done. Step 2, Check for dialogue. Where is it? (scans organizer) There. That’s done. Last, I need to check for quotes.

Teacher: (goes around to check students’ work, approaches Shay) Nice job, Shay.

Narrator: Let’s see how this made everyone feel.

Shay: (thought bubble) I used to just wait for my teacher to help me, but now I can do it all on my own. It’s a lot faster this way.

Teacher: (thought bubble) I used to have to tell Shay every single step. I’m so proud that he can handle this work by himself now.

Narrator: Following directions takes some thinking. We repeat the steps in our head and do one at a time until they’re done. When we do this, we’re acting like an independent student, and our teacher will be proud.

[WHAT DID WE LEARN?]

Narrator: So, what did we learn?

To follow directions without reminders:

Think about what you need to do first

Check that you’re done with one step before moving on.

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What is Receptive Language?

Receptive language is the language that we understand. When we are listening to someone speak or when we read, we are using our receptive language skills. We will talk about how phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics play a role in receptive language.

Language consists of receptive and expressive language. Receptive language is the language that we understand , and expressive language is the language that we use . Receptive language consists of listening and reading, and expressive language consists of speaking and writing.

Receptive language skills include following directions, understanding grammar (syntax) and vocabulary (semantics), and comprehending spoken conversations or text from stories.

Receptive Language and the Five Domains of Language

There are five domains of language : phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics , and pragmatics . Within each of the domains, someone can develop receptive skills (e.g. understanding vocabulary) and expressive skills (e.g. using correct grammar)

Receptive Language and Phonology

Phonology is the study of the smallest units of language that govern how phonemes are used. Phonemes consist of many sounds, such as (but not limited to) /s/, /a/, and /m/. Phonemes are always denoted within brackets like / / to show that we are talking about the way something sounds . It is important to note that sometimes the letter symbol and the actual sound the phoneme makes do not match up. You can find more information about phonemes and the International Phonetic Alphabet here .

Receptive understanding of phonology is being able to distinguish one sound from another when listening. For someone who speaks English, it is understanding that the letter “s” makes the /s/ sound in English . Higher level receptive language skills related to reading is knowing that “g” makes the /g/ sound, “h” makes the /h/ sound, but together, “gh” (e.g., as in the word “dou gh ”) will sound differently.

Receptive Language and Morphology

Morphology is the study of the smallest meaningful units of language, which are called morphemes . For example, the phonemes /b/, /ɪ/, /r/, and /d/ do not hold significance in English and aren’t considered morphemes, but together, /bɪrd/ makes “bird,” which is a word that holds meaning and is a morpheme. /s/ is considered a morpheme because when added to /bɪrd/, the meaning is changed, making the word “birds.”

Receptive understanding of morphology is understanding how morphemes are used ; therefore someone who hears /bɪrd/ knows that it is referring to one bird, but /bɪrds/ is referring to two or more birds. When reading, someone knows that adding “s” to the end of a word changes its meaning.

Receptive Language and Syntax (Grammar)

Syntax refers to the word order of phrases and sentences. In English, correct syntax indicates that one would say, “I ate a cookie,” not “ate I a cookie.” Receptive understanding of syntax is understanding that “I” (the person), ate something: a cookie (the object) . Receptive understanding of syntax when reading is reading the sentence “I ate a cookie," and understanding what is occurring.

Receptive Language and Semantics

Semantics refers to one’s knowledge of vocabulary , or words in a language. It is understanding what the word “soccer” or “excited” means. Receptive understanding of semantics is understanding what someone means when they say, “excited,” and when reading it is reading the word “excited” and knowing what that means.

Receptive Language and Pragmatics

Pragmatics is the social use of language or how individuals may interact with each other or a group. It is knowing that when someone says “hello,” they are greeting you, or that when someone says, “what about you?” you are expected to respond to them.

Receptive understanding of pragmatics is understanding these exchanges when they are spoken, and when reading it is understanding the author’s or character’s point of view.

Receptive Language Resources

Looking for more information about receptive language? We've got you covered!

How to Write Receptive Language Goals (free article)

School-Aged Speech Therapy Goals for Language (comprehensive resource)

5 Simple (but effective) Receptive Language Activities

Plural Nouns Receptive Language Worksheet

Language Milestones birth to 5

When reading this post, you used your receptive language skills to understand what we wrote! We used our expressive language skills via writing to (hopefully) clearly express this topic.

Citations/further resources:

https://www.asha.org/practice-portal/clinical-topics/spoken-language-disorders/language-in-brief/#:~:text=Spoken%20and%20written%20language%20are,%2C%20speaking%20and%20writing)%20components.

How to Write Play Skills Goals [with goal bank]

Types of Figurative Language

Early Intervention and Speech Therapy: What to Expect

Cognition and Speech Therapy: Addressing Cognitive-Communicative Deficits

Research Outlines and Summaries for Speech Therapists

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Prompting in Speech Therapy: Quick Tips for How to Use Gestural Prompts

January 26, 2023

As SLPs, we all use prompting in our speech therapy sessions. It helps us build upon what a child already knows by scaffolding the skills that we target. There are many forms of prompts and scaffolds. We’ve spent time talking about the importance of verbal prompts and visual prompts in the past.

Today, let’s chat about ways to use gestural prompting in speech therapy.

WHAT IS IT?

Gestural prompts are supports in the form of a gesture or action that the learner can observe the instructor doing. This could include pointing, nodding, reaching, etc.

Gestures give clues and information about the correct response in a non-verbal way. They are like a mix between physical prompts and visual prompts. For more information about prompts and cues in general, including when to use which type, check out this blog post .

TYPES OF GESTURAL PROMPTS

Here are a few of the most common types of gestures that you might use with your students.

1. Modeling

Modeling involves the therapist demonstrating a gesture while saying a word or phrase , in order to encourage the client to imitate it. For example, an SLP might tell a student to clap their hands while modeling clapping hands.

2. Pointing

This involves the therapist pointing in the direction of the correct response . For example, an SLP may point to an object or picture while saying the word for it, in order to help the child make the connection between the word and the object.

teacher pointing to text and student looking

3. Hand gestures

Many use hand gestures as a slightly less direct cue than pointing. It involves moving your hand to indicate a specific object or area . For example, the SLP says, “Put the toy on the shelf.” while gesturing toward the shelf.

4. Looking/nodding

This involves looking or nodding in the direction of the correct response . You may use this to encourage a child to follow directions. For example, after giving a direction (“sit in the chair”), the SLP looks at the student and then looks at the chair.

This could also include looking at a child expectantly . I use this one all the time with my minimally verbal kids to give them a clue that I’m waiting for them to respond.

5. Iconic gestures

This reminds me of miming . It involves using gestures that resemble the action or object being described, such as holding an imaginary steering wheel to indicate “driving” or making a rocking motion to indicate “rocking.”

6. Phonemic supports

I use gestures for articulation and phonetic cuing all the time. You might do it too, like touching your nose for a nasal sound. I’m actually trained in Visual Phonics , which is a system of hand cues that represent the 46 phonemic sounds of spoken English. There are a few different systems for using hand gestures to cue articulation sounds out there. Visual Phonics is just one we use district-wide for both literacy and articulation, so my students are familiar with it.

IMPORTANT THINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN USING GESTURES

It is important to note that gestural prompts should be used in conjunction with verbal prompts , not as a replacement for verbal language. Additionally, gestural prompts should be tailored to the individual client’s needs and abilities.

When using gestural prompting in speech therapy, it is important to have a plan to fade the prompt . Even within gestures, you can give a more direct to less direct cue. For example, if you are giving a direct model, you might decrease to a small hand gesture, then to a look or head nod. You could also decrease the number of prompts given.

DOWNLOAD A FREE GUIDE!

You might be thinking that all the different kinds of prompts, cues, scaffolds, and when to use them are starting to get jumbled in your head. If you want a concise, easy-to-read reference for scaffolding, be sure to download this FREE Scaffolding Guide !

It includes all my best tips and checklists to give you a clear understanding of prompting! With this guide you’ll get:

My favorite tips for using prompts
Helpful strategies and examples for visual, verbal, and gestural prompt
List of printable resources and my favorite scaffolding and prompting blog posts
Lists of the types of supports and examples for how to use each one!

Head over HERE to feel better about scaffolding and get your guide sent straight to your inbox!

January 28, 2023 at 9:12 am

wonderful, bravo, love your free forms! this is so helpful for my families! slp, dee dee

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Second Opinion

Age-Appropriate Speech and Language Milestones

The ability to hear is essential for proper speech and language development. Hearing problems may be suspected in children who are not responding to sounds or who are not developing their language skills appropriately. The following are some age-related guidelines that may help to decide if your child is experiencing hearing problems.

It's important to remember that not every child is the same. Children reach milestones at different ages. Talk your child's healthcare provider if you are suspicious that your child is not developing speech and language skills correctly. The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders and other experts list the following age-appropriate speech and language milestones for babies and young children.

Milestones related to speech and language






	These sounds may not be fully mastered until age 7 or 8.

14.1 Four Methods of Delivery

Learning objectives.

Differentiate among the four methods of speech delivery.
Understand when to use each of the four methods of speech delivery.

Lt. Governor Anthony Brown bring greetings to the 13th Annual House of Ruth Spring Luncheon. by Brian K. Slack at Baltimore, MD

Maryland GovPics – House of Ruth Luncheon – CC BY 2.0.

The easiest approach to speech delivery is not always the best. Substantial work goes into the careful preparation of an interesting and ethical message, so it is understandable that students may have the impulse to avoid “messing it up” by simply reading it word for word. But students who do this miss out on one of the major reasons for studying public speaking: to learn ways to “connect” with one’s audience and to increase one’s confidence in doing so. You already know how to read, and you already know how to talk. But public speaking is neither reading nor talking.

Speaking in public has more formality than talking. During a speech, you should present yourself professionally. This doesn’t mean you must wear a suit or “dress up” (unless your instructor asks you to), but it does mean making yourself presentable by being well groomed and wearing clean, appropriate clothes. It also means being prepared to use language correctly and appropriately for the audience and the topic, to make eye contact with your audience, and to look like you know your topic very well.

While speaking has more formality than talking, it has less formality than reading. Speaking allows for meaningful pauses, eye contact, small changes in word order, and vocal emphasis. Reading is a more or less exact replication of words on paper without the use of any nonverbal interpretation. Speaking, as you will realize if you think about excellent speakers you have seen and heard, provides a more animated message.

The next sections introduce four methods of delivery that can help you balance between too much and too little formality when giving a public speech.

Impromptu Speaking

Impromptu speaking is the presentation of a short message without advance preparation. Impromptu speeches often occur when someone is asked to “say a few words” or give a toast on a special occasion. You have probably done impromptu speaking many times in informal, conversational settings. Self-introductions in group settings are examples of impromptu speaking: “Hi, my name is Steve, and I’m a volunteer with the Homes for the Brave program.” Another example of impromptu speaking occurs when you answer a question such as, “What did you think of the documentary?”

The advantage of this kind of speaking is that it’s spontaneous and responsive in an animated group context. The disadvantage is that the speaker is given little or no time to contemplate the central theme of his or her message. As a result, the message may be disorganized and difficult for listeners to follow.

Here is a step-by-step guide that may be useful if you are called upon to give an impromptu speech in public.

Take a moment to collect your thoughts and plan the main point you want to make.
Thank the person for inviting you to speak.
Deliver your message, making your main point as briefly as you can while still covering it adequately and at a pace your listeners can follow.
Thank the person again for the opportunity to speak.
Stop talking.

As you can see, impromptu speeches are generally most successful when they are brief and focus on a single point.

Extemporaneous Speaking

Extemporaneous speaking is the presentation of a carefully planned and rehearsed speech, spoken in a conversational manner using brief notes. By using notes rather than a full manuscript, the extemporaneous speaker can establish and maintain eye contact with the audience and assess how well they are understanding the speech as it progresses. The opportunity to assess is also an opportunity to restate more clearly any idea or concept that the audience seems to have trouble grasping.

For instance, suppose you are speaking about workplace safety and you use the term “sleep deprivation.” If you notice your audience’s eyes glazing over, this might not be a result of their own sleep deprivation, but rather an indication of their uncertainty about what you mean. If this happens, you can add a short explanation; for example, “sleep deprivation is sleep loss serious enough to threaten one’s cognition, hand-to-eye coordination, judgment, and emotional health.” You might also (or instead) provide a concrete example to illustrate the idea. Then you can resume your message, having clarified an important concept.

Speaking extemporaneously has some advantages. It promotes the likelihood that you, the speaker, will be perceived as knowledgeable and credible. In addition, your audience is likely to pay better attention to the message because it is engaging both verbally and nonverbally. The disadvantage of extemporaneous speaking is that it requires a great deal of preparation for both the verbal and the nonverbal components of the speech. Adequate preparation cannot be achieved the day before you’re scheduled to speak.

Because extemporaneous speaking is the style used in the great majority of public speaking situations, most of the information in this chapter is targeted to this kind of speaking.

Speaking from a Manuscript

Manuscript speaking is the word-for-word iteration of a written message. In a manuscript speech, the speaker maintains his or her attention on the printed page except when using visual aids.

The advantage to reading from a manuscript is the exact repetition of original words. As we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, in some circumstances this can be extremely important. For example, reading a statement about your organization’s legal responsibilities to customers may require that the original words be exact. In reading one word at a time, in order, the only errors would typically be mispronunciation of a word or stumbling over complex sentence structure.

However, there are costs involved in manuscript speaking. First, it’s typically an uninteresting way to present. Unless the speaker has rehearsed the reading as a complete performance animated with vocal expression and gestures (as poets do in a poetry slam and actors do in a reader’s theater), the presentation tends to be dull. Keeping one’s eyes glued to the script precludes eye contact with the audience. For this kind of “straight” manuscript speech to hold audience attention, the audience must be already interested in the message before the delivery begins.

It is worth noting that professional speakers, actors, news reporters, and politicians often read from an autocue device, such as a TelePrompTer, especially when appearing on television, where eye contact with the camera is crucial. With practice, a speaker can achieve a conversational tone and give the impression of speaking extemporaneously while using an autocue device. However, success in this medium depends on two factors: (1) the speaker is already an accomplished public speaker who has learned to use a conversational tone while delivering a prepared script, and (2) the speech is written in a style that sounds conversational.

Speaking from Memory

Memorized speaking is the rote recitation of a written message that the speaker has committed to memory. Actors, of course, recite from memory whenever they perform from a script in a stage play, television program, or movie scene. When it comes to speeches, memorization can be useful when the message needs to be exact and the speaker doesn’t want to be confined by notes.

The advantage to memorization is that it enables the speaker to maintain eye contact with the audience throughout the speech. Being free of notes means that you can move freely around the stage and use your hands to make gestures. If your speech uses visual aids, this freedom is even more of an advantage. However, there are some real and potential costs. First, unless you also plan and memorize every vocal cue (the subtle but meaningful variations in speech delivery, which can include the use of pitch, tone, volume, and pace), gesture, and facial expression, your presentation will be flat and uninteresting, and even the most fascinating topic will suffer. You might end up speaking in a monotone or a sing-song repetitive delivery pattern. You might also present your speech in a rapid “machine-gun” style that fails to emphasize the most important points. Second, if you lose your place and start trying to ad lib, the contrast in your style of delivery will alert your audience that something is wrong. More frighteningly, if you go completely blank during the presentation, it will be extremely difficult to find your place and keep going.

Key Takeaways

There are four main kinds of speech delivery: impromptu, extemporaneous, manuscript, and memorized.
Impromptu speaking involves delivering a message on the spur of the moment, as when someone is asked to “say a few words.”
Extemporaneous speaking consists of delivering a speech in a conversational fashion using notes. This is the style most speeches call for.
Manuscript speaking consists of reading a fully scripted speech. It is useful when a message needs to be delivered in precise words.
Memorized speaking consists of reciting a scripted speech from memory. Memorization allows the speaker to be free of notes.
Find a short newspaper story. Read it out loud to a classroom partner. Then, using only one notecard, tell the classroom partner in your own words what the story said. Listen to your partner’s observations about the differences in your delivery.
In a group of four or five students, ask each student to give a one-minute impromptu speech answering the question, “What is the most important personal quality for academic success?”
Watch the evening news. Observe the differences between news anchors using a TelePrompTer and interviewees who are using no notes of any kind. What differences do you observe?

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Definition of direction

commandment
instruction

Examples of direction in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'direction.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

see direct entry 1

15th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Phrases Containing direction

a step in the right direction
co - direction
direction angle
direction cosine
direction finder
in the direction of (something)
sense of direction
stage direction

Dictionary Entries Near direction

direct investment

directional

Cite this Entry

“Direction.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/direction. Accessed 24 Aug. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of direction, more from merriam-webster on direction.

Nglish: Translation of direction for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of direction for Arabic Speakers

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Expressive vs. Receptive Language

February 10, 2023

Erin Vollmer MS, CCC-SLP

Why is expressive and receptive language development important?

We use expressive and receptive language skills to communicate with others effectively. If a child has consistent difficulty understanding others or sharing thoughts, ideas and feelings, they may have a language disorder. A language disorder can be a receptive or expressive language disorder . To determine if your child has receptive or expressive language difficulties, it is important to understand the difference between receptive language and expressive language.

What is receptive language?

Receptive language is the “input” of language, the ability to understand and comprehend spoken language that you hear or read. For example, a child’s ability to listen and follow directions (e.g. “put on your coat”) relies on the child’s receptive language skills. In typical development, children are able to understand language before they are able to produce it. Children who are unable to comprehend language may have receptive language difficulties or a receptive language disorder.

Children who have difficulty understanding language may struggle with the following:

Following directions
Understanding what gestures mean
Answering questions
Identifying objects and pictures
Reading comprehension
Understanding a story

There are several factors that influence receptive language development, including exposure to language, the quality of the language environment, and individual differences in language processing. Children who are surrounded by language (people engaging in conversation and interacting with them) are more likely to develop strong receptive language skills. This includes being exposed to a variety of speakers, engaging in conversations, and exposure to reading.

How to improve receptive language:

Here are some ways parents can work with their children to improve receptive language skills:

Books and Audiobooks: Reading is a great way to increase vocabulary and improve listening skills. Listening to audiobooks is another way to improve auditory processing skills. Whenever possible, ask your child follow up questions about what they read or heard.

Listening Games: Play listening games , such as ” Simon Says,” “I Spy,” or “ Bop It ” to help your child improve their listening skills.

Conversations: Encourage your child to pay attention to the speech of others in conversations . Challenge them to remember details and ask related follow up questions.

Visuals: Use visuals, such as pictures or videos, to help your child understand spoken language.

Gestures and Facial expressions: Use gestures and facial expressions when speaking to help illustrate the meaning of words. Point out the gestures and facial expressions of others in pictures and help your child understand the meaning behind them.

Everyday Opportunities: Take advantage of daily routines, such as meal times and car rides, to tell stories, have conversations and ask questions of your child. For children with receptive language difficulties, a predictable routine will help them understand the language around them.

If you suspect that your child may need additional help, speech language therapy is highly effective in improving receptive language skills. A speech-language pathologist will use a variety of informal and formal assessments to determine a child’s specific receptive language weaknesses.

A comprehensive treatment plan is created for each child. Goals may focus on attention and concentration, vocabulary, understanding of grammar, figurative language, comprehension strategies and following directions.

Speech therapy for receptive language is specific to each child’s unique needs. Improving receptive language skills will allow a child to fully and independently participate in their daily activities.

What is expressive language?

Expressive language is the “output” of language, the ability to express your wants and needs through verbal or nonverbal communication. It is the ability to put thoughts into words and sentences in a way that makes sense and is grammatically correct. Children that have difficulty communicating their wants and needs may have expressive language difficulties or an expressive language disorder. Expressive language disorders in young children are often identified when children are not meeting their developmental milestones .

Children who have difficulty producing language may struggle with the following:

Asking questions
Naming objects
Using gestures
Using facial expressions
Making comments
Syntax (grammar rules)
Semantics (word/sentence meaning)
Morphology (forms of words)

How to improve expressive language:

Here are some ways parents can work with their children to improve expressive language skills:

Conversation: Encourage your child to share their thoughts, feelings, and experiences with you. Ask open-ended questions that require more than a one-word answer (i.e. what did you do at school today)?

Pretend Play : props, such as dolls, action figures, toy animals, and even household items are a great way to spark imaginative play . Ask your child to tell you what they are imagining.

Storytelling: Ask your child to tell stories, make up their own stories, or act out stories. If your child is having trouble, help them break down the timeline and sequence of events (i.e. “what happened first”). Children continue to develop narrative language skills throughout childhood. Stories become more elaborate and detailed as children get older.

Everyday Opportunities: Take advantage of everyday routines, such as meal times and car rides, to practice expressive language skills. Games such as “highs and lows” at dinner are excellent for developing these skills.

Descriptions and Details: Ask you child to describe things, events, and people in detail. For example, if they are telling you about a video, ask specific questions that enable them to provide more detail (i.e. “what did the car look like.”)

Speaking Opportunities: If your child is comfortable, encourage them to speak in front of others, such as family members. (i.e. “do you want to tell grandpa what happened at school yesterday?)

If your child needs additional help, speech therapy is effective in improving expressive language delays and deficits. Expressive language therapy focuses on giving each child the tools and strategies they need to communicate their needs, thoughts, feelings and ideas to the world.

Reach out to TherapyWorks

TherapyWorks has built a large network of therapists , all of whom hold a masters or doctorate degree in their field and have significant experience working with expressive and receptive language delays and disorders. Our extensive talent pool enables us to thoughtfully match each child with a therapist that has the right training and experience based on that child’s specific needs. The result is effective, successful therapy.

Current Research on Autism

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Chapter 9: Preparing a Speech

9.4 outlining, learning objectives.

Explain the principles of outlining.
Create a formal outline.
Explain the importance of writing for speaking.
Create a speaking outline.

Think of your outline as a living document that grows and takes form throughout your speech-making process. When you first draft your general purpose, specific purpose, and thesis statement, you could create a new document on your computer and plug those in, essentially starting your outline. As you review your research and distill the information down into separate central ideas that support your specific purpose and thesis, type those statements into the document. Once you’ve chosen your organizational pattern and are ready to incorporate supporting material, you can quote and paraphrase your supporting material along with the bibliographic information needed for your verbal citations into the document. By this point, you have a good working outline, and you can easily cut and paste information to move it around and see how it fits into the main points, subpoints, and sub-subpoints. As your outline continues to take shape, you will want to follow established principles of outlining to ensure a quality speech.

The Formal Outline

The formal outline is a full-sentence outline that helps you prepare for your speech. It includes the introduction and conclusion, the main content of the body, key supporting materials, citation information written into the sentences in the outline, and a references page for your speech. The formal outline also includes a title, the general purpose, specific purpose, and thesis statement. It’s important to note that an outline is different from a script. While a script contains everything that will be said, an outline includes the main content. Therefore you shouldn’t include every word you’re going to say on your outline. This allows you more freedom as a speaker to adapt to your audience during your speech. Students sometimes complain about having to outline speeches or papers, but it is a skill that will help you in other contexts. Being able to break a topic down into logical divisions and then connect the information together will help ensure that you can prepare for complicated tasks or that you’re prepared for meetings or interviews. I use outlines regularly to help me organize my thoughts and prepare for upcoming projects.

Outlining provides a scaffolding, or structure, that will help ensure your speech is logical, coherent, and organized.

Wikimedia Commons – CC BY 2.0.

Principles of Outlining

There are principles of outlining you can follow to make your outlining process more efficient and effective. Four principles of outlining are consistency, unity, coherence, and emphasis (DuBois, 1929). In terms of consistency, you should follow standard outlining format. In standard outlining format, main points are indicated by capital roman numerals, subpoints are indicated by capital letters, and sub-subpoints are indicated by Arabic numerals. Further divisions are indicated by either lowercase letters or lowercase roman numerals.

The principle of unity means that each letter or number represents one idea. One concrete way to help reduce the amount of ideas you include per item is to limit each letter or number to one complete sentence. If you find that one subpoint has more than one idea, you can divide it into two subpoints. Limiting each component of your outline to one idea makes it easier to then plug in supporting material and helps ensure that your speech is coherent. In the following example from a speech arguing that downloading music from peer-to-peer sites should be legal, two ideas are presented as part of a main point.

Downloading music using peer-to-peer file-sharing programs helps market new music and doesn’t hurt record sales.

The main point could be broken up into two distinct ideas that can be more fully supported.

Downloading music using peer-to-peer file-sharing programs helps market new music.
Downloading music using peer-to-peer file-sharing programs doesn’t hurt record sales.

Following the principle of unity should help your outline adhere to the principle of coherence, which states that there should be a logical and natural flow of ideas, with main points, subpoints, and sub-subpoints connecting to each other (Winans, 1917). Shorter phrases and keywords can make up the speaking outline, but you should write complete sentences throughout your formal outline to ensure coherence. The principle of coherence can also be met by making sure that when dividing a main point or subpoint, you include at least two subdivisions. After all, it defies logic that you could divide anything into just one part. Therefore if you have an A , you must have a B , and if you have a 1 , you must have a 2 . If you can easily think of one subpoint but are having difficulty identifying another one, that subpoint may not be robust enough to stand on its own. Determining which ideas are coordinate with each other and which are subordinate to each other will help divide supporting information into the outline (Winans, 1917). Coordinate points are on the same level of importance in relation to the thesis of the speech or the central idea of a main point. In the following example, the two main points (I, II) are coordinate with each other. The two subpoints (A, B) are also coordinate with each other. Subordinate points provide evidence or support for a main idea or thesis. In the following example, subpoint A and subpoint B are subordinate to main point II. You can look for specific words to help you determine any errors in distinguishing coordinate and subordinate points. Your points/subpoints are likely coordinate when you would connect the two statements using any of the following: and , but , yet , or , or also . In the example, the word also appears in B, which connects it, as a coordinate point, to A. The points/subpoints are likely subordinate if you would connect them using the following: since , because , in order that , to explain , or to illustrate . In the example, 1 and 2 are subordinate to A because they support that sentence.

They conclude that the rapid increase in music downloading over the past few years does not significantly contribute to declining record sales.
Their research even suggests that the practice of downloading music may even have a “slight positive effect on the sales of the top albums.”
A 2010 Government Accountability Office Report also states that sampling “pirated” goods could lead consumers to buy the “legitimate” goods.

The principle of emphasis states that the material included in your outline should be engaging and balanced. As you place supporting material into your outline, choose the information that will have the most impact on your audience. Choose information that is proxemic and relevant, meaning that it can be easily related to the audience’s lives because it matches their interests or ties into current events or the local area. Remember primacy and recency discussed earlier and place the most engaging information first or last in a main point depending on what kind of effect you want to have. Also make sure your information is balanced. The outline serves as a useful visual representation of the proportions of your speech. You can tell by the amount of space a main point, subpoint, or sub-subpoint takes up in relation to other points of the same level whether or not your speech is balanced. If one subpoint is a half a page, but a main point is only a quarter of a page, then you may want to consider making the subpoint a main point. Each part of your speech doesn’t have to be equal. The first or last point may be more substantial than a middle point if you are following primacy or recency, but overall the speech should be relatively balanced.

Sample Formal Outline

The following outline shows the standards for formatting and content and can serve as an example as you construct your own outline. Check with your instructor to see if he or she has specific requirements for speech outlines that may differ from what is shown here.

Title: The USA’s Neglected Sport: Soccer

General purpose: To persuade

Specific purpose: By the end of my speech, the audience will believe that soccer should be more popular in the United States.

Thesis statement: Soccer isn’t as popular in the United States as it is in the rest of the world because people do not know enough about the game; however, there are actions we can take to increase its popularity.

Introduction

Attention getter: GOOOOOOOOOOOOAL! GOAL! GOAL! GOOOOOOAL!

Introduction of topic: If you’ve ever heard this excited yell coming from your television, then you probably already know that my speech today is about soccer.

Credibility and relevance: Like many of you, I played soccer on and off as a kid, but I was never really exposed to the culture of the sport. It wasn’t until recently, when I started to watch some of the World Cup games with international students in my dorm, that I realized what I’d been missing out on. Soccer is the most popular sport in the world, but I bet that, like most US Americans, it only comes on your radar every few years during the World Cup or the Olympics. If, however, you lived anywhere else in the world, soccer (or football, as it is more often called) would likely be a much larger part of your life.

Preview: In order to persuade you that soccer should be more popular in the United States, I’ll explain why soccer isn’t as popular in the United States and describe some of the actions we should take to change our beliefs and attitudes about the game.

Transition: Let us begin with the problem of soccer’s unpopularity in America.

The president of FIFA, which is the international governing body for soccer, was quoted in David Goldblatt’s 2008 book, The Ball is Round , as saying, “Football is as old as the world…People have always played some form of football, from its very basic form of kicking a ball around to the game it is today.”
Basil Kane, author of the book Soccer for American Spectators , reiterates this fact when he states, “Nearly every society at one time or another claimed its own form of kicking game.”
Our own “national sports” such as football, basketball, and baseball take up much of our time and attention, which may prevent people from engaging in an additional sport.
Comparatively, 34 percent of those surveyed said that football was their favorite sport to watch.
In fact, soccer just barely beat out ice skating, with 3 percent of the adults surveyed indicating that as their favorite sport to watch.
According to the 2009 article from BleacherReport.com, “An American Tragedy: Two Reasons Why We Don’t Like Soccer,” the average length of a play in the NFL is six seconds, and there is a scoring chance in the NBA every twenty-four seconds.
This stands in stark comparison to soccer matches, which are played in two forty-five-minute periods with only periodic breaks in play.
The BleacherReport article also points out that unlike with football, basketball, and baseball—all sports in which the United States has most if not all the best teams in the world—we know that the best soccer teams in the world aren’t based in the United States.
We also expect that sports will offer the same chances to compare player stats and obsess over data that we get from other sports, but as Chad Nielsen of ESPN.com states, “There is no quantitative method to compare players from different leagues and continents.”
Last, as legendary sports writer Frank Deford wrote in a 2012 article on Sports Illustrated ’s website, Americans don’t like ties in sports, and 30 percent of all soccer games end tied, as a draw, deadlocked, or nil-nil.

Transition: Although soccer has many problems that it would need to overcome to be more popular in the United States, I think there are actions we can take now to change our beliefs and attitudes about soccer in order to give it a better chance.

Fans argue every day, in bars and cafés from Baghdad to Bogotá, about statistics for goals and assists, but as Nielsen points out, with the game of soccer, such stats still fail to account for varieties of style and competition.
So even though the statistics may be different, bonding over or arguing about a favorite team or player creates communities of fans that are just as involved and invested as even the most loyal team fans in the United States.
The fact that soccer statistics aren’t poured over and used to make predictions makes the game more interesting.
The fact that the segments of play in soccer are longer and the scoring lower allows for the game to have a longer arc, meaning that anticipation can build and that a game might be won or lost by only one goal after a long and even-matched game.
There is most likely a minor or even a major league soccer stadium team within driving distance of where you live.
You can also go to soccer games at your local high school, college, or university.
We can also join the rest of the world in following some of the major soccer celebrities—David Beckham is just the tip of the iceberg.
Soccer can easily be the most athletic sport available to Americans.
In just one game, the popular soccer player Gennaro Gattuso was calculated to have run about 6.2 miles, says Carl Bialik, a numbers expert who writes for The Wall Street Journal .
A press release on FIFA’s official website notes that one hour of soccer three times a week has been shown in research to provide significant physical benefits.
If that’s not convincing enough, the website ScienceDaily.com reports that the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports published a whole special issue titled Football for Health that contained fourteen articles supporting the health benefits of soccer.
The nongovernmental organization Soccer for Peace seeks to use the worldwide popularity of soccer as a peacemaking strategy to bridge the divides of race, religion, and socioeconomic class.
Over those ten years the organization has focused on using soccer to bring together people of different religious faiths, particularly people who are Jewish and Muslim.
In 2012, three first-year college students, one Christian, one Jew, and one Muslim, dribbled soccer balls for 450 miles across the state of North Carolina to help raise money for Soccer for Peace.
A press release on the World Association of Nongovernmental Organizations’s official website states that from the dusty refugee camps of Lebanon to the upscale new neighborhoods in Buenos Aires, “soccer turns heads, stops conversations, causes breath to catch, and stirs hearts like virtually no other activity.”

Transition to conclusion and summary of importance: In conclusion, soccer is a sport that has a long history, can help you get healthy, and can bring people together.

Review of main points: Now that you know some of the obstacles that prevent soccer from becoming more popular in the United States and several actions we can take to change our beliefs and attitudes about soccer, I hope you agree with me that it’s time for the United States to join the rest of the world in welcoming soccer into our society.

Closing statement: The article from BleacherReport.com that I cited earlier closes with the following words that I would like you to take as you leave here today: “We need to learn that just because there is no scoring chance that doesn’t mean it is boring. We need to see that soccer is not for a select few, but for all. We only need two feet and a ball. We need to stand up and appreciate the beautiful game.”

Araos, C. (2009, December 10). An American tragedy: Two reasons why we don’t like soccer. Bleacher Report: World Football . Retrieved from http://bleacherreport.com/articles/306338-an-american-tragedy-the-two-reasons-why-we-dont-like-soccer

Bialik, C. (2007, May 23). Tracking how far soccer players run. WSJ Blogs: The Numbers Guy . Retrieved from http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/tracking-how-far-soccer-players-run-112

Deford, F. (2012, May 16). Americans don’t like ties in sports. SI.com : Viewpoint. Retrieved from http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/writers/frank_deford/05/16/Americans-do-not-like-ties/index.html

FIFA.com (2007, September 6). Study: Playing football provides health benefits for all. Retrieved from http://www.fifa.com/aboutfifa/footballdevelopment/medical/news/newsid=589317/index.html

Goldblatt, D. (2008). The ball is round: A global history of soccer . New York, NY: Penguin.

Kane, B. (1970). Soccer for American spectators: A fundamental guide to modern soccer . South Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes.

Nielsen, C. (2009, May 27). “What I do is play soccer.” ESPN . Retrieved from http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=4205057

Pew Research Center. (2006, June 14). Americans to rest of world: Soccer not really our thing. Pew Research Center . Retrieved from http://pewresearch.org/pubs/315/americans-to-rest-of-world-soccer-not-really-our-thing

ScienceDaily.com. (2010, April 7). Soccer improves health, fitness, and social abilities. ScienceDaily.com: Science news . Retrieved from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100406093524.htm

Selle, R. R. (n.d.). Soccer for peace. Wango.org: News . Retrieved from http://www.wango.org/news/news/psmp.htm

Examples of APA Formatting for References

The citation style of the American Psychological Association (APA) is most often used in communication studies when formatting research papers and references. The following examples are formatted according to the sixth edition of the APA Style Manual. Links are included to the OWL Purdue website, which is one of the most credible online sources for APA format. Of course, to get the most accurate information, it is always best to consult the style manual directly, which can be found in your college or university’s library.

For more information on citing books in APA style on your references page, visit http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/08 .

Single Author

Two Authors

Warren, J. T., & Fassett, D. L. (2011). Communication: A critical/cultural introduction . Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

Chapter from Edited Book

Mumby, D. K. (2011). Power and ethics. In G. Cheney, S. May, & D. Munshi (Eds.), The handbook of communication ethics (pp. 84–98). New York, NY: Routledge.

Periodicals

For more information on citing articles from periodicals in APA style on your references page, visit http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/07 .

Huang, L. (2011, August 1). The death of English (LOL). Newsweek, 152 (6), 8.

Kornblum, J. (2007, October 23). Privacy? That’s old-school: Internet generation views openness in a different way. USA Today , 1D–2D.

Journal Article

Bodie, G. D. (2012). A racing heart, rattling knees, and ruminative thoughts: Defining, explaining, and treating public speaking anxiety. Communication Education, 59 (1), 70–105.

Online Sources

For more information on citing articles from online sources in APA style on your references page, visit http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/10 .

Online Newspaper Article

Perman, C. (2011, September 8). Bad economy? A good time for a steamy affair. USA Today . Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/story/2011-09-10/economy-affairs-divorce-marriage/50340948/1

Online News Website

Fraser, C. (2011, September 22). The women defying France’s full-face veil ban. BBC News . Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15023308

Online Magazine

Cullen, L. T. (2007, April 26). Employee diversity training doesn’t work. Time . Retrieved from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1615183,00.html

Government Document or Report Retrieved Online

Pew Research Center. (2010, November 18). The decline of marriage and rise of new families. Retrieved from http://pewsocialtrends.org/files/2010/11/pew-social-trends-2010-families.pdf

The Speaking Outline

The formal outline is a full-sentence outline that helps as you prepare for your speech, and the speaking outline is a keyword and phrase outline that helps you deliver your speech. While the formal outline is important to ensure that your content is coherent and your ideas are balanced and expressed clearly, the speaking outline helps you get that information out to the audience. Make sure you budget time in your speech preparation to work on the speaking outline. Skimping on the speaking outline will show in your delivery.

Using note cards for your speaking outline will help you be able to move around and gesture more freely than using full sheets of paper.

Justin See (coming back) – My Pile of Index Card – CC BY 2.0.

You may convert your formal outline into a speaking outline using a computer program. I often resave a file and then reformat the text so it’s more conducive to referencing while actually speaking to an audience. You may also choose, or be asked to, create a speaking outline on note cards. Note cards are a good option when you want to have more freedom to gesture or know you won’t have a lectern on which to place notes printed on full sheets of paper. In either case, this entails converting the full-sentence outline to a keyword or key-phrase outline. Speakers will need to find a balance between having too much or too little content on their speaking outlines. You want to have enough information to prevent fluency hiccups as you stop to mentally retrieve information, but you don’t want to have so much information that you read your speech, which lessens your eye contact and engagement with the audience. Budgeting sufficient time to work on your speaking outline will allow you to practice your speech with different amounts of notes to find what works best for you. Since the introduction and conclusion are so important, it may be useful to include notes to ensure that you remember to accomplish all the objectives of each.

Aside from including important content on your speaking outline, you may want to include speaking cues. Speaking cues are reminders designed to help your delivery. You may write “(PAUSE)” before and after your preview statement to help you remember that important nonverbal signpost. You might also write “(MAKE EYE CONTACT)” as a reminder not to read unnecessarily from your cards. Overall, my advice is to make your speaking outline work for you. It’s your last line of defense when you’re in front of an audience, so you want it to help you, not hurt you.

Writing for Speaking

As you compose your outlines, write in a way that is natural for you to speak but also appropriate for the expectations of the occasion. Since we naturally speak with contractions, write them into your formal and speaking outlines. You should begin to read your speech aloud as you are writing the formal outline. As you read each section aloud, take note of places where you had difficulty saying a word or phrase or had a fluency hiccup, then go back to those places and edit them to make them easier for you to say. This will make you more comfortable with the words in front of you while you are speaking, which will improve your verbal and nonverbal delivery.

Tips for Note Cards

The 4 × 6 inch index cards provide more space and are easier to hold and move than 3.5 × 5 inch cards.
Find a balance between having so much information on your cards that you are tempted to read from them and so little information that you have fluency hiccups and verbal fillers while trying to remember what to say.
Use bullet points on the left-hand side rather than writing in paragraph form, so your eye can easily catch where you need to pick back up after you’ve made eye contact with the audience. Skipping a line between bullet points may also help.
Include all parts of the introduction/conclusion and signposts for backup.
Include key supporting material and wording for verbal citations.
Only write on the front of your cards.
Do not have a sentence that carries over from one card to the next (can lead to fluency hiccups).
If you have difficult-to-read handwriting, you may type your speech and tape or glue it to your cards. Use a font that’s large enough for you to see and be neat with the glue or tape so your cards don’t get stuck together.
Include cues that will help with your delivery. Highlight transitions, verbal citations, or other important information. Include reminders to pause, slow down, breathe, or make eye contact.
Your cards should be an extension of your body, not something to play with. Don’t wiggle, wring, flip through, or slap your note cards.

Key Takeaways

The formal outline is a full-sentence outline that helps you prepare for your speech and includes the introduction and conclusion, the main content of the body, citation information written into the sentences of the outline, and a references page.
The principles of outlining include consistency, unity, coherence, and emphasis.
Coordinate points in an outline are on the same level of importance in relation to the thesis of the speech or the central idea of a main point. Subordinate points provide evidence for a main idea or thesis.
The speaking outline is a keyword and phrase outline that helps you deliver your speech and can include speaking cues like “pause,” “make eye contact,” and so on.
Write your speech in a manner conducive to speaking. Use contractions, familiar words, and phrases that are easy for you to articulate. Reading your speech aloud as you write it can help you identify places that may need revision to help you more effectively deliver your speech.
What are some practical uses for outlining outside of this class? Which of the principles of outlining do you think would be most important in the workplace and why?
Identify which pieces of information you may use in your speech are coordinate with each other and subordinate.
Read aloud what you’ve written of your speech and identify places that can be reworded to make it easier for you to deliver.

DuBois, W. C., Essentials of Public Speaking (New York: Prentice Hall, 1929), 104.

Winans, J. A., Public Speaking (New York: Century, 1917), 407.

Communication in the Real World: An Introduction to Communication Studies. Provided by : University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing edition, 2016. This edition adapted from a work originally produced in 2013 by a publisher who has requested that it not receive attribution.. Located at : https://open.lib.umn.edu/communication/ . License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

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[ dih- rek -sh uh n , dahy - ]

the act or an instance of directing .

The storm moved in a northerly direction.

The direction is north.

a position on a line extending from a specific point toward a point of the compass or toward the nadir or the zenith.

the direction of contemporary thought.

directions for baking a cake.

order; command.

a company under good direction.

a directorate .
the name and address of the intended recipient as written on a letter, package, etc.
decisions in a stage or film production as to stage business, speaking of lines, lighting, and general presentation.
the technique, act, or business of making such decisions, managing and training a cast of actors, etc.
the technique, act, or business of directing an orchestra, concert, or other musical presentation or group.
Music. a symbol or phrase that indicates in a score the proper tempo, style of performance, mood, etc.

He doesn't seem to have any direction in life.

/ dɪˈrɛkʃən; daɪ- /

the act of directing or the state of being directed
management, control, or guidance
the work of a stage or film director
the course or line along which a person or thing moves, points, or lies
the course along which a ship, aircraft, etc, is travelling, expressed as the angle between true or magnetic north and an imaginary line through the main fore-and-aft axis of the vessel
the place towards which a person or thing is directed
a line of action; course
the name and address on a letter, parcel, etc
music the process of conducting an orchestra, choir, etc
music an instruction in the form of a word or symbol heading or occurring in the body of a passage, movement, or piece to indicate tempo, dynamics, mood, etc
(of an angle) being any one of the three angles that a line in space makes with the three positive directions of the coordinate axes. Usually given as α, β, and γ with respect to the x-, y-, and z- axes
(of a cosine) being the cosine of any of the direction angles

Other Words From

di·rection·less adjective
predi·rection noun
self-di·rection noun
super·di·rection noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of direction 1

Idioms and Phrases

Synonym study, example sentences.

Now, barely a week later, Epstein's home in North Hollywood, California, has AT&T fiber service with unlimited data and advertised speeds of 300Mbps in both directions.

Light winds pick up just a tad from the northeasterly direction before dawn.

Those fans can take today’s hearing as a step, however small, in the direction of Spears’s increased autonomy.

In every direction, seawater creeps higher and higher, slopping across the floor of nearby buildings.

Either of those words alone point in the direction of filling, comfort-food satisfaction, but together they are practically a guarantee.

Pleasure shoots magically in every direction like an explosion of sparks.

Absent a body, no one can say with absolute certainty whether Castro is dead, even if all signs point in that direction.

An arrow appears indicating the direction you will launch your ball.

They had hoped the autopsy would show Brinsley had eaten something that would point them in the right direction.

The ATSB has been impressive in the way it has taken over the direction of the search for Flight 370.

A lateen sail was visible in the direction of Cat Island, and others to the south seemed almost motionless in the far distance.

After a bit of waiting, Mac decided that the smoke was floating from a certain direction, and we began to edge carefully that way.

Even genius, however, needs direction and adjustment to secure the most perfect and reliable results.

Now many people think that we are moving in the direction of world socialism to-day.

His superior talents and untiring industry were under the direction of philanthropic and Christian impulses.

Related Words

orientation

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

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Knowledge Base
Parts of speech

The 8 Parts of Speech | Chart, Definition & Examples

A part of speech (also called a word class ) is a category that describes the role a word plays in a sentence. Understanding the different parts of speech can help you analyze how words function in a sentence and improve your writing.

The parts of speech are classified differently in different grammars, but most traditional grammars list eight parts of speech in English: nouns , pronouns , verbs , adjectives , adverbs , prepositions , conjunctions , and interjections . Some modern grammars add others, such as determiners and articles .

Many words can function as different parts of speech depending on how they are used. For example, “laugh” can be a noun (e.g., “I like your laugh”) or a verb (e.g., “don’t laugh”).

Prepositions
Conjunctions
Interjections

Other parts of speech

Interesting language articles, frequently asked questions.

A noun is a word that refers to a person, concept, place, or thing. Nouns can act as the subject of a sentence (i.e., the person or thing performing the action) or as the object of a verb (i.e., the person or thing affected by the action).

There are numerous types of nouns, including common nouns (used to refer to nonspecific people, concepts, places, or things), proper nouns (used to refer to specific people, concepts, places, or things), and collective nouns (used to refer to a group of people or things).

Ella lives in France .

Other types of nouns include countable and uncountable nouns , concrete nouns , abstract nouns , and gerunds .

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A pronoun is a word used in place of a noun. Pronouns typically refer back to an antecedent (a previously mentioned noun) and must demonstrate correct pronoun-antecedent agreement . Like nouns, pronouns can refer to people, places, concepts, and things.

There are numerous types of pronouns, including personal pronouns (used in place of the proper name of a person), demonstrative pronouns (used to refer to specific things and indicate their relative position), and interrogative pronouns (used to introduce questions about things, people, and ownership).

That is a horrible painting!

A verb is a word that describes an action (e.g., “jump”), occurrence (e.g., “become”), or state of being (e.g., “exist”). Verbs indicate what the subject of a sentence is doing. Every complete sentence must contain at least one verb.

Verbs can change form depending on subject (e.g., first person singular), tense (e.g., simple past), mood (e.g., interrogative), and voice (e.g., passive voice ).

Regular verbs are verbs whose simple past and past participle are formed by adding“-ed” to the end of the word (or “-d” if the word already ends in “e”). Irregular verbs are verbs whose simple past and past participles are formed in some other way.

“I’ve already checked twice.”

“I heard that you used to sing .”

Other types of verbs include auxiliary verbs , linking verbs , modal verbs , and phrasal verbs .

An adjective is a word that describes a noun or pronoun. Adjectives can be attributive , appearing before a noun (e.g., “a red hat”), or predicative , appearing after a noun with the use of a linking verb like “to be” (e.g., “the hat is red ”).

Adjectives can also have a comparative function. Comparative adjectives compare two or more things. Superlative adjectives describe something as having the most or least of a specific characteristic.

Other types of adjectives include coordinate adjectives , participial adjectives , and denominal adjectives .

An adverb is a word that can modify a verb, adjective, adverb, or sentence. Adverbs are often formed by adding “-ly” to the end of an adjective (e.g., “slow” becomes “slowly”), although not all adverbs have this ending, and not all words with this ending are adverbs.

There are numerous types of adverbs, including adverbs of manner (used to describe how something occurs), adverbs of degree (used to indicate extent or degree), and adverbs of place (used to describe the location of an action or event).

Talia writes quite quickly.

Other types of adverbs include adverbs of frequency , adverbs of purpose , focusing adverbs , and adverbial phrases .

A preposition is a word (e.g., “at”) or phrase (e.g., “on top of”) used to show the relationship between the different parts of a sentence. Prepositions can be used to indicate aspects such as time , place , and direction .

I left the cup on the kitchen counter.

A conjunction is a word used to connect different parts of a sentence (e.g., words, phrases, or clauses).

The main types of conjunctions are coordinating conjunctions (used to connect items that are grammatically equal), subordinating conjunctions (used to introduce a dependent clause), and correlative conjunctions (used in pairs to join grammatically equal parts of a sentence).

You can choose what movie we watch because I chose the last time.

An interjection is a word or phrase used to express a feeling, give a command, or greet someone. Interjections are a grammatically independent part of speech, so they can often be excluded from a sentence without affecting the meaning.

Types of interjections include volitive interjections (used to make a demand or request), emotive interjections (used to express a feeling or reaction), cognitive interjections (used to indicate thoughts), and greetings and parting words (used at the beginning and end of a conversation).

Ouch ! I hurt my arm.

I’m, um , not sure.

The traditional classification of English words into eight parts of speech is by no means the only one or the objective truth. Grammarians have often divided them into more or fewer classes. Other commonly mentioned parts of speech include determiners and articles.

Determiners

A determiner is a word that describes a noun by indicating quantity, possession, or relative position.

Common types of determiners include demonstrative determiners (used to indicate the relative position of a noun), possessive determiners (used to describe ownership), and quantifiers (used to indicate the quantity of a noun).

My brother is selling his old car.

Other types of determiners include distributive determiners , determiners of difference , and numbers .

An article is a word that modifies a noun by indicating whether it is specific or general.

The definite article the is used to refer to a specific version of a noun. The can be used with all countable and uncountable nouns (e.g., “the door,” “the energy,” “the mountains”).
The indefinite articles a and an refer to general or unspecific nouns. The indefinite articles can only be used with singular countable nouns (e.g., “a poster,” “an engine”).

There’s a concert this weekend.

If you want to know more about nouns , pronouns , verbs , and other parts of speech, make sure to check out some of our language articles with explanations and examples.

Nouns & pronouns

Common nouns
Proper nouns
Collective nouns
Personal pronouns
Uncountable and countable nouns
Verb tenses
Phrasal verbs
Types of verbs
Active vs passive voice
Subject-verb agreement

A is an indefinite article (along with an ). While articles can be classed as their own part of speech, they’re also considered a type of determiner .

The indefinite articles are used to introduce nonspecific countable nouns (e.g., “a dog,” “an island”).

In is primarily classed as a preposition, but it can be classed as various other parts of speech, depending on how it is used:

Preposition (e.g., “ in the field”)
Noun (e.g., “I have an in with that company”)
Adjective (e.g., “Tim is part of the in crowd”)
Adverb (e.g., “Will you be in this evening?”)

As a part of speech, and is classed as a conjunction . Specifically, it’s a coordinating conjunction .

And can be used to connect grammatically equal parts of a sentence, such as two nouns (e.g., “a cup and plate”), or two adjectives (e.g., “strong and smart”). And can also be used to connect phrases and clauses.

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Speech Acts

We are attuned in everyday conversation not primarily to the sentences we utter to one another, but to the speech acts that those utterances are used to perform: requests, warnings, invitations, promises, apologies, predictions, and the like. Such acts are staples of communicative life, but only became a topic of sustained investigation, at least in the English-speaking world, in the middle of the twentieth century. [ 1 ] Since that time “speech act theory” has become influential not only within philosophy, but also in linguistics, psychology, legal theory, artificial intelligence, literary theory, and feminist thought among other scholarly disciplines. [ 2 ] Recognition of the significance of speech acts has illuminated the ability of language to do other things than describe reality. In the process the boundaries among the philosophy of language, the philosophy of action, aesthetics, the philosophy of mind, political philosophy, and ethics have become less sharp. In addition, an appreciation of speech acts has helped lay bare a normative structure implicit in linguistic practice, including even that part of this practice concerned with describing reality. Much recent research aims at an accurate characterization of this normative structure underlying linguistic practice.

1. Introduction

2.1 the independence of force and content, 2.2 can saying make it so, 2.3 theories of performativity, 3.1 direction of fit, 3.2 conditions of satisfaction, 3.3 seven components of illocutionary force, 3.4 direct and indirect force, 4.1 force conventionalism, 4.2 a biosemantic species of force conventionalism.

4.3 An Intentionalist Alternative to Force Conventionalism

5.1 Grice’s Account of Speaker Meaning

5.2 objections to grice’s account, 5.3 force as an aspect of speaker meaning, 6.1 speech acts and conversations, 6.2 speech acts and scorekeeping, 7. force-indicators and the logically perfect language, 8. do speech acts have a logic, 9. speech acts and social issues, further reading, other internet resources, related entries.

Bertrand Russell’s Theory of Descriptions was a paradigm for many philosophers in the twentieth century. One reason for this is that it suggested a way to respond to longstanding philosophical problems by showing them to be specious. Russell argued that such sentences as ‘The present King of Singapore is bald,’ and, ‘The round square is impossible,’ possess superficial grammatical forms that are misleading as to their underlying logical structure. In so doing he showed how such sentences can be meaningful without this fact obliging us to posit current Singaporean monarchs or round squares. Many philosophers in what came to be known as the Ordinary Language movement were inspired by this achievement to argue that classic philosophical problems (e.g., of free will, the relation of mind to body, truth, the nature of knowledge, and of right and wrong) likewise rested on a misunderstanding of the language in which these problem are couched. In How to Do Things with Words , J.L. Austin for instance writes,

…in recent years, many things which would once have been accepted without question as ‘statements’ by both philosophers and grammarians have been scrutinized with new care… It has come to be commonly held that many utterances which look like statements are either not intended at all, or only intended in part, to record or impart straightforward information about the facts…Along these lines it has by now been shown piecemeal, or at least made to look likely, that many traditional philosophical perplexities have arisen through a mistake-the mistake of taking as straightforward statements of fact utterances which are either (in interesting non-grammatical ways) nonsensical or else intended as something quite different. Whatever we may think of any particular one of these views and suggestions…it cannot be doubted that they are producing a revolution in philosophy. (Austin 1962, pp. 1–2)

The Ordinary Language movement, with its broad claim that the meaning of an expression should be equated with its use, and its desire to transcend traditional philosophical perplexities, did not achieve the revolution of which Austin speaks. Nonetheless one of its enduring legacies is the notion of a speech act.

One way of appreciating the distinctive features of speech acts is in contrast with other well-established phenomena within the philosophy of language and linguistics. Accordingly in this entry we will consider the relations among speech acts and: semantic content, grammatical mood, speaker-meaning, logically perfect languages, perlocutions, performatives, presuppositions , and implicature . This will enable us to situate speech acts within their ecological niche.

2. Content, Force, and How Saying Can Make It So

Whereas an act of speech is any act of uttering [ 3 ] meaningful words, ‘speech act’ is a term of art. As a first approximation, speech acts are those acts that can (though need not) be performed by saying that one is doing so. On this conception, resigning, promising, asserting and asking are all speech acts, while convincing, insulting and growing six inches are not. One can, for instance, resign by saying, “I resign…”, although one can also resign from a position without describing oneself as doing so. However, this conception is too inclusive, since it also counts whispering as a speech act even though one can whisper a string of nonsense words without meaning anything. Instead a more accurate characterization of speech acts builds on Grice’s notion of speaker meaning. This notion is discussed further in Section 5 below, but for now it is enough to note that in looking at my watch, I might be trying to tell the time; or I might be trying to indicate to you that it’s time for us to leave. The latter (but not the former) is a case of speaker meaning.

Accordingly, a speech act is a type of act that can be performed by speaker meaning that one is doing so. This conception still counts resigning, promising, asserting and asking as speech acts, while ruling out convincing, insulting and whispering. This definition leaves open the possibility of speech acts being performed wordlessly, as well as speech acts being performed without saying that you are doing so. Our characterization of speech acts captures this fact in emphasizing speaker meaning rather than the uttering of any words.

Speech acts are thus also to be distinguished from performatives. ‘Performative’ is another technical term, and as used here it refers in the first instance to a kind of sentence. A performative sentence is in the first person, present tense, indicative mood, active voice, that describes its speaker as performing a speech act. ‘I assert that George is the culprit,’ is a performative sentence by this test. As we have seen, one can perform a speech act without uttering a performative. Further, since it is merely a type of sentence, one can utter a performative without performing a speech act. For instance, while talking in my sleep I might say, “I hereby promise to climb the Eiffel Tower,” without thereby making any promise. We may also define a performative utterance as an utterance of a performative sentence that is also a speech act. [ 4 ]

More nomenclature: ‘Speech act’ and ‘illocution’ will here be used synonymously. The latter term is due to Austin, who used ‘illocutionary force’ to refer to a dimension of communicative acts. (It is nowadays common also to use ‘illocute’ as a verb meaning ‘to perform a speech act.’) Austin’s reason for using ‘force’ begins with the observation that, construed as a bit of observable behavior, the communicative significance of an act may be underdetermined by what has been said or observably done. I bow deeply before you. So far you may not know whether I am paying obeisance, responding to indigestion, or looking for a wayward contact lens. So too, an utterance of a meaningful sentence (which Austin calls a locutionary act ) such as ‘You’ll be more punctual in the future,’ may leave you wondering whether I am making a prediction or issuing a command or even a threat. The colloquial question, “What is the force of those words?” is often used to elicit an answer. In asking such a question we acknowledge a grasp of those words’ meaning but seek to know how that meaning is to be taken–as a threat, as a prediction, or as a command.

Or so it seems. In an early challenge to Austin, Cohen (1964) argues that the notion of illocutionary force is otiose provided we already have in place the notion of a sentence’s meaning (Austin’s locutionary meaning). Cohen contends that for a performative sentence such as ‘I promise to read that novel,’ its meaning already guarantees that it is a promise. On the other hand, for a sentence that is not a performative, such as ‘I will read that novel,’ if it is understood as being used to make a promise, the promise is still implicit in the sentence’s meaning. In either case, Cohen concludes, meaning already guarantees force and so we do not require an extra-semantic notion to do so.

Cohen’s reasoning assumes that any utterance of ‘I promise to read that novel’ is a promise. But as we have seen with the case of the somniloquist, neither a sentence, nor even the utterance of a sentence, is sufficient on its own for the performance of a speech act, be it a promise or some other. In a similar spirit to that of Cohen, Searle (1968, p. 407) observes that a serious and literal utterance of ‘I promise to read that novel,’ made under what he terms “conditions of successful utterance”, also counts as a promise. Searle concludes from this that some locutionary acts are also illocutionary acts, and infers from this in turn that for some sentences, their locutionary meaning determines their illocutionary force. This last inference is, however, a non sequitur . As we have seen, the aforementioned sentence’s meaning does not determine the illocutionary force with which it is uttered. Rather, when that sentence is uttered in such a way as to constitute a promise, what determines that force is the meaning of the sentence together with such factors as the speaker’s being serious and other contextual conditions being met.

We may thus agree with Searle that some locutionary acts are also illocutionary acts, without losing sight of our earlier observation that locutionary meaning underdetermines illocutionary force. This fact about underdetermination is implied by Davidson’s Thesis of the Autonomy of Linguistic Meaning, according to which once a bit of language has acquired a conventional meaning, it can be used for any of a variety of extra-linguistic purposes (Davidson, 1979). Green 1997 argues for a qualification of Davidson’s Autonomy Thesis to recognize sentences having the feature that if they are used in a speech act all, then there is at least one other illocutionary force that their utterance must have. Even in light of this qualified version of the Autonomy Thesis, the most that can be said of, ‘I promise to climb the Eiffel Tower,’ is that it is designed to be used to make promises, just as common nouns are designed to be used to refer to things and predicates are designed to characterize things referred to. Below (Section 6.3) we shall consider the view that force is a component of meaning, albeit not of a sentence’s meaning. [ 5 ]

Let us return, then, to an elucidation of our distinction between what a speaker says and the force of her utterance. A grammatical sentence composed of meaningful words is commonly thought to express a “content,” which is determined by what that sentence literally means together with features of the context of utterance. Suppose I say to someone in a crowded subway, “You’re standing on my foot.” I am most likely trying to convey the message that he should move. However, what I literally say is only that the addressee in question is standing on my foot. This is the content of my utterance. Many if not most utterances of grammatical sentences composed of meaningful words express more than those sentences’ contents. Pragmaticians, however, commonly distinguish content from other aspects of meaning conveyed by an utterance. On this way of thinking, two intertranslatable sentences of different languages will express the same content, and certain transformations of a sentence within a language are commonly thought to express the same content. Thus, ‘Mary saw John,’ and ‘John was seen by Mary,’ will express the same content even if a speaker’s use of one rather than another of these will carry a distinctive suggestion. For indicative sentences, such contents are typically called Propositions . (In what follows I will capitalize this term to signify that it is in part technical.) Propositions, then, are the contents of indicative sentences, are what such sentences express, and, further, are often thought to be the primary bearers of truth value.

Illocutionary force and semantic content are often taken to be distinct from one another, not just in the way that your left and right hand are distinct, but rather by virtue of falling into different categories. Stenius 1967 elucidates this distinction, noting that in chemical parlance a radical is a group of atoms normally incapable of independent existence, whereas a functional group is the grouping of those atoms in a compound that is responsible for certain of that compound’s properties. Analogously, a Proposition is itself communicatively inert. For instance, merely expressing the Proposition that it is snowing is not to make a move in a “language game”. Rather, such a move is only made by putting forth a Proposition with an illocutionary force such as assertion, conjecture, command, etc. The chemical analogy gains further support from the fact that just as a chemist might isolate radicals held in common among various compounds, the student of language may isolate a common element held among ‘Is the door shut?’, ‘Shut the door!’, and ‘The door is shut’. This common element is the Proposition that the door is shut, queried in the first sentence, commanded to be made true in the second, and asserted in the third. According to the chemical analogy, then:

Illocutionary force : Propositional content :: functional group : radical

In light of this analogy we may see, following Stenius, that just as the grouping of a set of atoms is not itself another atom or set of atoms, so too the forwarding of a Proposition with a particular illocutionary force is not itself a further component of Propositional content.

Encouraged by the chemical analogy, a central tenet in the study of speech acts is that content may remain fixed while force varies. The force of an utterance also underdetermines its content: Just from the fact that a speaker has made a promise, we cannot deduce what she has promised to do. For these reasons, students of speech acts contend that a given communicative act may be analyzed into two components: force and content. While semantics studies the contents of communicative acts, pragmatics studies their force.

The force/content distinction also finds parallels in our understanding of mentality. Speech acts are not only moves in a “language game.” They also often purport to express of states of mind with analogous structural properties. An assertion that it is snowing purports to express the speaker’s belief that it is snowing. A promise to read Middlemarch purports to express the speaker’s intention to read Middlemarch . We find evidence for these relationships in the fact that it is in some sense absurd to say, ‘It’s snowing, but I don’t believe that it is,’ and ‘I promise to read Middlemarch , but I have no intention of doing so.’ [ 6 ] Further, just as we may distinguish between an assert ing and what is assert ed (the so-called “ing/ed ambiguity” for verbs such as ‘assert’), and a promis ing from what is promis ed , we may also distinguish between a state of believing and what is believed, and a state or act of intending and what is intended. Searle 1983 delineates structural analogies between speech acts and the mental states they express. Pendlebury 1986 succinctly explains the merits of this approach.

In spite of these structural analogies, we may still wonder why an elucidation of the notion of force is important for a theory of communication. That A is an important component of communication, and that A underdetermines B , do not justify the conclusion that B is an important component of communication. Content also underdetermines the decibel level at which we speak but this fact does not justify adding decibel level to our repertoire of core concepts for pragmatics or the philosophy of language. Why should force be thought any more worthy of admission to this set of core concepts than decibel level? One reason for an asymmetry in our treatment of force and decibel level is that the former, but not the latter, seems to be a component of speaker meaning: Force is a feature not of what is said but of how what is said is meant; decibel level, by contrast, is a feature at most of the way in which something is said. This point is developed in Section 5 below.

We have spoken thus far as if the contents of speech acts must be Propositions, and indeed Searle routinely analyzes speech acts as having the form F ( p ) (e.g., 1975, p. 344), where ‘ F ’ is the force component and ‘ p ’ the Propositional content component. However, in the last two decades linguistic semantics has developed formal representations of contents for the two other major grammatical moods besides the indicative, namely the interrogative and the imperative. On the strength of the analyses of Hamblin (1958), Bell (1975), Pendlebury (1986) and others, one strategy for the semantics of interrogatives is to construe them as expressing sets of propositions rather than a single proposition, where each element of the putative set is a complete answer to the question at issue. Thus the content expressed by ‘How many doors are shut?’ will be {<No doors are shut>, <One door is shut>, …} where the ellipsis will be filled by as many other Propositions as it is reasonable to interpret the questioner as asking after. Call such a set an Interrogative . A complete answer to an Interrogative is an element of the set by which it is defined; a partial answer is a subset of that set containing two or more members, as would naturally be expressed by the sentence ‘Between two and four doors are shut.’ On the present conceptualization, just as we may distinguish between expressing and asserting a Propositional content, we may also distinguish between expressing an Interrogative and asking a question. One merely expresses an Interrogative in such an utterance as, ‘John wonders how many doors are shut.’ In fact, a single utterance may express two Interrogatives while asking neither, as in ‘How many doors are shut will depend on how many customers are trying on clothes.’ Asking a question is no less substantial a conversational move than is making an assertion.

Similarly, work by Hamblin (1987), Belnap (1990), Portner (2004) and others suggests semantic analyses for sentences in the imperative mood: on one approach an imperative expresses a property, and when one speaker issues an imperative that her addressee accepts, that property is added to her “to do list”, itself a parameter of what we will later describe as conversational score (Section 7).

In light of the above liberalization of the notion of sentential content to accommodate the contents of non-indicative sentences, we may rephrase Stenius’s chemical analogy as follows:

Illocutionary force : sentential content :: functional group : radical

with the understanding that different types of sentential content will correspond to the different grammatical moods. This refined analogy would in turn require there to be different types of radical. [ 7 ]

In some cases we can make something the case by saying that it is. Alas, I cannot lose ten pounds by saying that I am doing so, nor can I persuade you of a claim by saying that I am doing so. On the other hand I can promise to meet you tomorrow by uttering the words, “I promise to meet you tomorrow,” and if I have the authority to do so, I can even appoint you to an office by saying, “I hereby appoint you.” (I can also appoint you without making the force of my act explicit: I might just say, “You are now Treasurer of the Corporation.”) Only an appropriate authority, speaking at the appropriate time and place, can: christen a ship, pronounce a couple married, appoint someone to an administrative post, declare the proceedings open, or rescind an offer. Austin, in How To Do Things With Words, details the conditions that must be met for a given speech act to be performed felicitously .

Failures of felicity fall into two classes: misfires and abuses . The former are cases in which the putative speech act fails to be performed at all. If I utter, before the QEII, “I declare this ship the Noam Chomsky,” I have not succeeded in naming anything because I lack the authority to do so. My act thus misfires in that I’ve performed an act of speech but no speech act. Other attempts at speech acts might misfire because their addressee fails to respond with an appropriate uptake : I cannot bet you $100 on who will win the election unless you accept that bet. If you do not accept that bet, then I have tried to bet but have not succeeded in betting. As we will see in Section 9, a systematic unwillingness on the part of a speaker’s interlocutors to respond with the requisite uptake may compromise that speaker’s freedom of speech.

Some speech acts can be performed–that is, not misfire—while still being less than felicitous. I promise to meet you for lunch tomorrow, but haven’t the least intention of making good. Here I have promised all right, but the act is not felicitous because it is not sincere. My act is, more precisely, an abuse because although it is a speech act, it fails to live up to a standard appropriate for speech acts of its kind. Sincerity is a paradigm condition for the felicity of speech acts. Austin foresaw a program of research in which thousands of types of speech act would be studied in detail, with felicity conditions elucidated for each. [ 8 ]

As observed by Sbisà 2007, not only can I perform a speech act by speaker meaning that I am doing so, I can also subsequently rescind that act. I cannot, it would seem, change the past, and so nothing I can do on Wednesday can change the fact that I made a promise or assertion on Monday. However, on Wednesday I may be able to retract a claim I made on Monday. I can’t take back a punch or a burp; the most I can do is apologize for one of these infractions, and perhaps make amends. By contrast, not only can I apologize or make amends for a claim I now regret; I can also withdraw it. Likewise, you may allow me on Wednesday to retract the promise I made to you on Monday. In both these cases of assertion and promise, I am now no longer beholden to the commitments that the speech acts engender in spite of the fact that the past is fixed. Just as one can, under appropriate conditions, perform a speech act by speaker meaning that one is doing so, so too one can, under the right conditions, retract that very speech act.

Austin famously denied that performatives are statements (1962, p. 6). This may be taken either as the denial that performative sentences, even those in the indicative grammatical mood, have truth value; or instead as the denial that utterances of performative sentences, even when such sentences have truth value, are assertions. One can consistently hold that an indicative sentence has truth value, and even that it may be uttered in such a way as to say something true, while denying that its utterance is an assertion. (Testing a microphone in a windowless room, I utter, “It’s raining,” and it happens to be raining outside. Here I have said something true but have made no assertion.)

Lemmon 1962 argues that performative utterances are true on the ground that they are instances of a wider class of sentences whose utterance guarantees their truth. If sound, this argument would show that performatives have truth value, but not that they are assertions. It also leaves unanswered the question why some verb phrases such as ‘I promise’ may be used performatively while others cannot be so used. Sinnott-Armstrong 1994 also argues that performatives can have truth value without addressing the question whether they are also used to make assertions. Reimer 1995 argues that while performatives have truth values, they are not also assertions. Adopting a similar strategy, Jary 2007 aims to explain how utterances of such sentences as “I order you to clean the kitchen,” can succeed in being orders. In so doing he draws on Green’s 2007 analysis of showing to argue that such utterances show (rather than merely describe) the force of the speaker’s utterance. Because ‘show’ is factive, if such an utterance shows its force, then it must have that force.

Most challenges to Austin, however, construe performatives as assertions and attempt to explain their properties in that light. Ginet 1979 argues that performative verbs (‘promise,’ ‘appoint’, etc.) name the kinds of acts that one can perform by asserting that one is doing so, and elaborates on why this is so. In this way he offers an account of how performatives work that depends on the assumption that performative utterances are assertions. Starting from that same assumption, Bach 1975 contends that ‘I order you to clean the kitchen’ is an assertion, and proceeds to explain on this basis how the speaker is indirectly also issuing an order. This explanation depends on the speaker’s being able to count on the addressee’s ability to discern the speaker’s communicative intention. In later work, such as Bach and Harnish 1978, and 1992, this view is refined with a notion of standardization, so that a sufficiently common practice of issuing assertions with performative effect enables speakers and hearers to bypass complex inferential reasoning and jump by default to a conclusion about the illocution being performed. Reimer 1995 challenges Bach and Harnish on the ground that hearers do not seem to impute assertoric force to the indicative sentences speakers utter with performative effect; her criticism would evidently carry over to Ginet’s proposal. Instead Reimer contends that performative utterances rest on systems of what she terms illocutionary conventions to achieve their performative effects.

Searle 1969, p. 62–4, had argued that a performative formula such as “I promise to…” is an “illocutionary force indicator” in the sense that it is a device whose role is to make explicit the force of the speaker’s utterance. Making something explicit, however, would seem to involve characterizing an independent event or state of affairs, and as a result Searle’s account presupposes that speakers can imbue their utterances with the force of demotions and excommunications; yet this is what was to be explained. Realizing this, Searle and Vanderveken (1985) characterize performatives as speech acts having the force of declarations. Uncontroversial examples of this speech act are declaring war or adjourning a meeting. Searle 1989 then acknowledges that this account pushes us back to the question how certain expressions come to have the power to make declarations. In that same work he offers an answer that depends on the view that in uttering a sentence with a performative prefix, a speaker manifests an intention to perform an act of a certain kind: in uttering the words, ‘I order you to close the door’, I manifest an intention to order you to close the door, etc. Searle also takes it that manifesting an intention to perform a speech act is sufficient for the performance of that act. On this basis, Searle goes on to attempt to derive the assertoric nature of performatives, holding that when uttered in such a way as to say something true, they are also assertions.

3. Aspects of Illocutionary Force

Austin distinguishes illocutionary acts into five categories: verdictives (in which a speaker gives a verdict, e.g. acquitting and diagnosing), exercitives (in which speakers exercise powers, rights or influence, e.g. excommunicating and resigning), commissives (in which speakers commit themselves to causes or courses of action, e.g. promising and betting), behabitives (concerning attitudes and social behavior, e.g. apologizing and toasting), and expositives (in which speakers clarify how their utterances fit into lines of reasoning, e.g., postulating and defining).

Searle (1975) criticizes Austin’s taxonomy on two central grounds. First, Austin’s methodology is unduly lexicographic, assuming that we can learn about the range and limits of illocutionary acts by studying illocutionary verbs in English or other natural languages. However, Searle observes, nothing rules out the possibility of there being illocutionary acts that are not named by a verb either in a particular language such as Swahili or Bengali, or indeed in any language at all; similarly, two non-synonymous illocutionary verbs may yet name one and the same illocutionary act.

Second, Searle argues that the principles of distinction among Austin’s categories are unclear. For instance, behavitives seem to be a heterogeneous group with little unifying principle. Similarly, ‘describe’ appears both as a verdictive and as an expositive whereas one would expect taxonomic categories to be mutually exclusive. More generally, Austin’s brief account of each category gives no direction as to why this way of delineating them does so along their most fundamental features. Searle offers a new categorization of speech acts based on relatively clear principles of distinction. To appreciate this it will help to explain some of the basic concepts he uses for this purpose.

Consider an example derived from Anscombe (1963): a woman sends her husband to the grocery store with a list of things to procure; unbeknownst to him he is also being trailed by a detective concerned to make a list of what the man buys. By the time the husband and detective are in the checkout line, their two lists contain exactly the same items. The contents of the two lists differ, however, along another dimension. For the contents of the husband’s list guide what he puts in his shopping cart. Insofar, his list exhibits world-to-word direction of fit : It is, so to speak, the job of the items in his cart to conform to what is on his list. By contrast, it is the job of the detective’s list to conform with the world, in particular to what is in the husband’s cart. As such, the detective’s list has word-to-world direction of fit : The onus is on those words to conform to how things are. Speech acts such as assertions and predictions have word-to-world direction of fit, while speech acts such as commands have world-to-word direction of fit.

Not all speech acts appear to have direction of fit. I can thank you by saying “Thank you,” and it is widely agreed that thanking is a speech act. However, thanking seems to have neither of the directions of fit we have discussed thus far. Similarly, asking who is at the door is a speech act, but it does not seem to have either of the directions of fit we have thus far mentioned. Some would respond by construing questions as a form of imperative (e.g., “Tell me who is at the door!”), and then ascribing the direction of fit characteristic of imperatives to questions. This leaves untouched, however, banal cases such as thanking or even, “Hooray for Arsenal!” Some authors, such as Searle and Vanderveken 1985, describe such cases as having “null” direction of fit. That characterization is evidently distinct from saying such speech acts have no direction of fit at all. [ 9 ]

Direction of fit is also not so fine-grained as to enable us to distinguish speech acts meriting different treatment. Consider asserting that the center of the Milky Way is inhabited by a black hole, as opposed to conjecturing that the center of the Milky Way is so inhabited. These two acts are subject to different norms: The former purports to be a manifestation of knowledge, while the latter does not. This is suggested by the fact that it is appropriate to reply to the assertion with, “How do you know?” (Williamson 1996), while that is not an appropriate response to the conjecture (Green 2017). Nevertheless, both the assertion and conjecture have word-to-world direction of fit. Might there be other notions enabling us to mark differences between speech acts with the same direction of fit?

One suggestion might come from the related notion of conditions of satisfaction . This notion generalizes that of truth. As we saw in 2.3, it is internal to the activity of assertion that it aims to capture how things are. When an assertion does so, not only is it true, it has hit its target; the aim of the assertion has been met. A similar point may be made of imperatives: it is internal to the activity of issuing an imperative that the world is enjoined to conform to it. The imperative is satisfied just in case it is fulfilled. Assertions and imperatives both have conditions of satisfaction—truth in the first place, and conformity in the second. In addition, it might be held that questions have answerhood as their conditions of satisfaction: A question hits its target just in case it finds an answer, often in a speech act, such as an assertion, that answers the question posed. Like the notion of direction of fit, however, the notion of conditions of satisfaction is too coarse-grained to enable us to make some valuable distinctions among speech acts. Just to use our earlier case again: an assertion and a conjecture that P have identical conditions of satisfaction, namely that P be the case. May we discern features distinguishing these two speech acts, in a way enabling us to make finer-grained distinctions among other speech acts as well? I shall return to this question in Sections 6–7.

In an attempt to systematize and deepen Austin’s approach, Searle and Vanderveken 1985 distinguish between those illocutionary forces employed by speakers within a given linguistic community, and the set of all possible illocutionary forces. While a certain linguistic community may make no use of forces such as conjecturing or appointing, these two are among the set of all possible forces. (These authors appear to assume that while the set of possible forces may be infinite, it has a definite cardinality.) Searle and Vanderveken go on to define illocutionary force in terms of seven features, namely:

Illocutionary point : This is the characteristic aim of each type of speech act. For instance, the characteristic aim of an assertion is to describe how things are, and perhaps also to bring about belief in an addressee; the characteristic aim of a promise is to commit oneself to a future course of action.
Degree of strength of the illocutionary point : Two illocutions can have the same point but differ along the dimension of strength. For instance, requesting and insisting that the addressee do something both have the point of attempting to get the addressee to do that thing; however, the latter is stronger than the former.
Mode of achievement : This is the special way, if any, in which the illocutionary point of a speech act must be achieved. Testifying and asserting both have the point of describing how things are; however, the former also involves invoking one’s authority as a witness while the latter does not. To testify is to assert in one’s capacity as a witness. Commanding and requesting both aim to get the addressee to do something; yet only someone issuing a command does so in her capacity as a person in a position of authority.
Content conditions : Some illocutions can only be achieved with an appropriate propositional content. For instance, I can only promise what is in the future and under my control; or, at least, I cannot promise to do anything that it is obvious to myself and my promissee that I cannot do. So too, I can only apologize for what is in some sense under my control and already the case. (In light of our discussion above of semantics for non-indicative contents, this condition could be recast in terms of imperatival, interrogative, and propositional content conditions.)
Preparatory conditions : These are all other conditions that must be met for the speech act not to misfire. Such conditions often concern the social status of interlocutors. For instance, a person cannot bequeath an object unless she already owns it or has power of attorney; a person cannot marry a couple unless she is legally invested with the authority to do so.
Sincerity conditions : Many speech acts involve the expression of a psychological state. Assertion expresses belief; apology expresses regret, a promise expresses an intention, and so on. A speech act is sincere only if the speaker is in the psychological state that her speech act expresses.
Degree of strength of the sincerity conditions : Two speech acts might be the same along other dimensions, but express psychological states that differ from one another in the dimension of strength. Requesting and imploring both express desires, and are identical along the other six dimensions above; however, the latter expresses a stronger desire than the former.

Searle and Vanderveken (1985) suggest, in light of these seven characteristics, that each illocutionary force may be defined as a septuple of values, each of which is a “setting” of a value within one of the seven characteristics. It follows, according to this suggestion, that two illocutionary forces F 1 and F 2 are identical just in case they correspond to the same septuple.

I cannot slow the expansion of the universe or convince you of the truth of a claim by saying that I am doing so. However, these two cases differ in that the latter, but not the former, is a characteristic aim of a speech act. One characteristic aim of assertion is the production of belief in an addressee, whereas there is no speech act one of whose characteristic aims is the slowing of the universe’s expansion. A type of speech act can have a characteristic aim without each speech act of that type being issued with that aim: Speakers sometimes make assertions without aiming to produce belief in anyone, even themselves. Instead, the view that a speech act-type has a characteristic aim is akin to the view that a biological trait has a function. The characteristic role of wings is to aid in flight even though some flightless creatures are winged.

Austin called these characteristic aims of speech acts perlocutions (1962, p. 101). I can both urge and persuade you to shut the door, yet the former is an illocution while the latter is a perlocution. How can we tell the difference? We can do so by noting that under the right conditions, one can urge just by saying and speaker meaning, “I hereby urge you to shut the door,” while there are no circumstances in which I can persuade you just by saying, “I hereby persuade you to shut the door.” A characteristic aim of urging is, nevertheless, the production of a resolution to act (1962, p. 107). Cohen (1973) develops the idea of perlocutions as characteristic aims of speech acts.

Perlocutions are characteristic aims of one or more illocution, but are not themselves illocutions. Nevertheless, one speech act can be performed by means of the performance of another. For instance, my remark that you are standing on my foot is normally taken as, in addition, a demand that you move; my question whether you can pass the salt is normally taken as a request that you do so. These are examples of so-called indirect speech acts (Searle 1979). Phrases that are commonly used in service of indirect speech acts are, ‘Would you mind terribly if I…,’ ‘Might I suggest…,’ and ‘It seems to me that…’, or simply ‘please’, as in ‘Can you pass the salt, please?’ Observe that this last sentence, with its appended tag-question, cannot be interpreted as a request for information (about the addressee’s salt-passing abilities), but can only be understood as a request. Asher and Lascarides (2001) provide a formal model of indirect speech acts on which some are conventionalized while others require Gricean reasoning for their interpretation.

While indirect communication is ubiquitous, indirect speech acts are less common than might first appear. In asking whether you intend to quit smoking, I might be taken as well to be suggesting that you quit. However, while the embattled smoker might jump to this interpretation, we do well to consider what evidence would mandate it. After all, while I probably would not have asked whether you intended to quit smoking unless I hoped you would quit, I can evince such a hope without performing the speech act of suggesting. Evincing a psychological state, even if done intentionally, arguably does not constitute a speech act. Instead, intentionally evincing a psychological state may be understood as simply expressing that state (See Green 2020, ch. 2).

Whether, in addition to a given speech act, I am also performing an indirect speech act would seem to depend on my intentions. My question whether you can pass the salt is also a request that you do so only if I intend to be so understood. What is more, this intention must be feasibly discernible on the part of one’s audience. Even if, in remarking on the fine weather, I intend as well to request that you pass the salt, I will not have issued a request unless I have made that intention manifest in some way.

How might I do this? One way is by making an inference to the best explanation. Perhaps the best explanation of my asking whether you can pass the salt is that I mean to be requesting that you do so, and perhaps the best explanation of my remarking that you are standing on my foot, particularly if I use a stentorian tone of voice, is that I mean to be demanding that you desist. By contrast, it is doubtful that the best explanation of my asking whether you intend to quit smoking is that I intend to suggest that you do so. Another explanation at least as plausible is my hope, or expression of hope, that you do so. Bertolet 1994 develops a more skeptical position than that suggested here, arguing that any alleged case of an indirect speech act can be construed just as an indication, by means of contextual clues, of the speaker’s intentional state—hope, desire, etc., as the case may be. Postulation of a further speech act beyond what has been (relatively) explicitly performed is, he contends, explanatorily unmotivated. McGowan et al . (2009) reply by offering three conditions they take to be sufficient for a case of what they term linguistic communication. They would also argue that in, for instance, the smoking case, the speaker meets those three conditions, and thus counts as suggesting that the addressee quit smoking. Bertolet (2017) replies that these three conditions are not sufficient for an instance of speaker meaning, and given that (as we have seen) speaker meaning is a necessary condition for (non-conventional) speech acts, concludes that McGowan et al . have not established that the cases that concern them are indirect speech acts.

These considerations suggest that indirect speech acts, if they do occur at all, can be explained within the framework of conversational implicature–that process by which we mean more (and on some occasions less) than we say, but in a way not due exclusively to the conventional meanings of our words. Conversational implicature, too, depends both upon communicative intentions and the availability of inference to the best explanation (Grice, 1989). In fact, Searle’s 1979 influential account of indirect speech acts is couched in terms of conversational implicature (although he does not use this phrase). The study of speech acts is in this respect intertwined with the study of conversations; we return to this theme in Section 6. [ 10 ]

4. Mood, Force and Convention

Not only does content underdetermine force; content together with grammatical mood does so as well. ‘You’ll be more punctual in the future’ is in the indicative grammatical mood, but as we have seen, that fact does not determine its force. The same may be said of other grammatical moods. Although I overhear you utter the words, ‘shut the door’, I cannot infer yet that you are issuing a command. Perhaps instead you are simply describing your own intention, in the course of saying, “I intend to shut the door.” If so, you’ve used the imperative mood without issuing a command. So too with the interrogative mood: I overhear your words, ‘who is on the phone.’ Thus far I don’t know whether you’ve asked a question, since you may have so spoken in the course of stating, “John wonders who is on the phone.” Might either or both of initial capitalization or final punctuation settle the issue? Apparently not: What puzzles Meredith is the following question: Who is on the phone?

Mood together with content underdetermine force. On the other hand it is a plausible hypothesis that grammatical mood is one of the devices we use (together with contextual clues, intonation, and the like) to indicate the force with which we are expressing a content. Understood in this weak way, it is unexceptionable to construe the interrogative mood as used for asking questions, the imperatival mood as used for issuing commands, and so on. So understood, we might go on to ask how speakers indicate the force of their speech acts given that grammatical mood and content cannot be relied on alone to do so.

One well known answer we may term force conventionalism . According to a strong version of this view, for every speech act that is performed, there is some convention that will have been invoked in order to make that speech act occur. This convention transcends those imbuing words with their literal meaning. Thus, force conventionalism implies that in order for use of ‘I promise to meet you tomorrow at noon,’ to constitute a promise, not only must the words used possess their standard conventional meanings, there must also exist a convention to the effect that the use, under the right conditions, of some such words as these constitutes a promise. Austin seems to have held this view. For instance in his characterization of “felicity conditions” for speech acts, Austin holds that for each speech act

There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances… (1962, p. 14).

Austin’s student Searle follows him in this, writing

…utterance acts stand to propositional and illocutionary acts in the way in which, e.g., making an X on a ballot paper stands to voting. (1969, p. 24)

Searle goes on to clarify this commitment in averring,

…the semantic structure of a language may be regarded as a conventional realization of a series of sets of underlying constitutive rules, and …speech acts are acts characteristically performed by uttering sentences in accordance with these sets of constitutive rules. (1969, p. 37)

Searle espouses a weaker form of force conventionalism than does Austin in leaving open the possibility that some speech acts can be performed without constitutive rules; Searle considers the case of a dog requesting to be let outside (1969, p. 39). Nevertheless Searle does contend that speech acts are characteristically performed by invoking constitutive rules.

Millikan (1998) espouses a parsimonious conception of conventions that she terms ‘natural conventions,’ and on the assumption that natural conventions are a type of convention, one would expect this strategy to make it easier to defend the view that speech acts are inherently conventional. For Millikan, a natural convention is constituted by patterns that are reproduced by virtue of the weight of precedent. [ 11 ] A pattern is reproduced just in case it has a form that derives from a previous entity having, in certain respects, the same form, and in such a way that had the previous form been different in those respects, the current form would be different in those respects as well (1998, p. 163). Photocopying is one form of reproduction meeting these criteria; the retinotopic mapping from patterns of stimulation on the retina to patterns of stimulation in the visual cortex is evidently another. Millikan would not treat retinotopic mapping as a type of convention, however, since it would not seem to be perpetuated by virtue of the weight of precedent. The point is difficult to discern, however, since in her discussion of the matter Millikan discusses the conditions under which a pattern is taken to be conventional, rather than for it to be conventional, writing

To be thought of as conventional, a reproduced pattern must be perceived as proliferated due, in important part, to weight of precedent, not to its intrinsically superior capacity to produce a desired result, or due, say, to ignorance of alternatives (ibid, p. 166).

Millikan thus seems to characterize what it is for a pattern to have weight of precedent in terms of that pattern’s being perceived to have such weight. This notion is not itself elucidated, and as a result the notion of weight of precedent is left obscure in her account. Nonetheless, she tells us that just as the conventions of chess dictate that when one’s king is in check, one does what one can to get him out of check; so too the conventions of language dictate that when A tells B that p , B responds by believing that p . Millikan describes the hearer’s response as a hidden, inner act that is not under B ’s voluntary control. Millikan also describes this response as being learned in the way that we learn what she calls “natural sign patterns,” such as our learning that the sound of crashing waves is an indication of a nearby coastline.

On Millikan’s view, then, A ’s assertion of p being followed by B ’s belief that p is a process that is not intrinsically superior to others that might have been followed. This may be doubted, however. What, after, all would be viable alternative responses? Dis believing p ? Remaining neutral on the question of p ? Scratching one’s left earlobe? Any of these responses would tend to undermine the use of language as a means for transmission of information. What is more, if belief formation is not under the voluntary control of addressees, it is obscure how this aspect of communication could be conventional, any more than the pattern of stimulation of our visual cortex is conventional when that pattern results from an isomorphic pattern on the retina.

4.3. An Intentionalist Alternative to Force Conventionalism

Force-conventionalism as espoused by Austin and later Searle has been challenged by Strawson , who writes,

I do not want to deny that there may be conventional postures or procedures for entreating: one can, for example, kneel down, raise one’s arms, and say, “I entreat you.” But I do want to deny that an act of entreaty can be performed only as conforming to such conventions….[T]o suppose that there is always and necessarily a convention conformed to would be like supposing that there could be no love affairs which did not proceed on lines laid down in the Roman de la Rose or that every dispute between men must follow the pattern specified in Touchstone’s speech about the countercheck quarrelsome and the lie direct. (1964, p. 444)

Strawson contends that rather than appealing to a series of extra-semantic conventions to account for the possibility of speech acts, we explain that possibility in terms of our ability to discern one another’s communicative intentions. What makes an utterance of a sentence in the indicative mood a prediction rather than a command, for instance, is that it manifests an intention to be so taken; likewise for promises rather than predictions. This position is compatible with holding that in special cases linguistic communities have instituted conventions for particular speech acts such as appointing and excommunicating. So too, as Skinner (1970) observes, understanding the utterances of an historical figure crucially depends on sensitivity to conventions of the society in which they are made.

Intending to make an assertion, promise, or request, however, is not enough to perform one of these acts. Those intentions must be efficacious. The same point applies to cases of trying to perform a speech act, even when what one is trying to do is clear to others. This fact emerges from reflecting on an oft-quoted passage from Searle:

Human communication has some extraordinary properties, not shared by most other kinds of human behavior. One of the most extraordinary is this: If I am trying to tell someone something, then (assuming certain conditions are satisfied) as soon as he recognizes that I am trying to tell him something and exactly what it is I am trying to tell him, I have succeeded in telling it to him. (1969, p. 47.)

As Green 2013 observes, the point may be doubted. Suppose I am trying to work up the courage to ask Sidney’s hand in marriage. Sidney recognizes this fact on the basis of background knowledge, my visible embarrassment, and my fumbling in my pocket for an engagement ring. Here we cannot infer that I have succeeded in asking Sidney anything. Nothing short of coming out and saying it will do. Similarly, it might be common knowledge that my moribund uncle is trying, as he breathes his last, to bequeath me his fortune; still, I won’t inherit a penny if he expires before saying what he was trying to. [ 12 ] Closer to Searle’s example, even if you were to find, on the basis of fMRI analysis of my neural activity, that I was trying to tell you that it’s going to rain tomorrow, I still have not asserted anything about tomorrow’s weather. (If I were completely paralyzed as a result of Locked-In Syndrome, then making such a neural effort might be the most I can hope to do; in that case, your fMRI information might be enough to justify you in taking me to have performed a speech act.)

The gist of these examples is not the requirement that words be uttered in every speech act—we have already observed that speech acts can be performed silently. Rather, their gist is that speech acts involve intentional undertaking of a publicly accessible commitment; further, that commitment is not undertaken simply by virtue of my intending to undertake it, even when it is common knowledge that this is what I am trying to do. Can we, however, give a more illuminating characterization of the relevant intentions than merely saying that, for instance, to assert P one must intentionally put forth P as an assertion? Strawson (1964) proposes that we can do so with aid of the notion of speaker meaning—to which we now turn.

5. Speaker-Meaning and Force

As we have seen, that A is an important component of communication, and that A underdetermines B , do not justify the conclusion that B is an important component of communication. One reason for an asymmetry in our treatment of force and decibel level is that the former, but not the latter, seems crucial to how I mean what I say. I intend to speak at a certain volume, and sometimes succeed, but in most cases it is no part of how I mean what I say that I happen to be speaking at that volume. On the other hand, the force of my utterance is an aspect of what I mean. It is not, as we have seen, any aspect of what I say—that notion being closely associated with content. However, whether I mean what I say as an assertion, a conjecture, a promise or something else will be crucial to how I mean what I do.

In his influential 1957 article, Grice distinguished between two uses of ‘mean’. One use is exemplified by remarks such as ‘Those clouds mean rain,’ and ‘Those spots mean measles.’ The notion of meaning in play in such cases Grice dubs ‘natural meaning’. Grice suggests that we may distinguish this use of ‘mean’ from another use of the word more relevant to communication, exemplified in such utterances as

In saying “You make a better door than a window”, George meant that you should move,

In gesticulating that way, Salvatore means that there’s quicksand over there,

Grice used the term ‘non-natural meaning’ for this use of ‘mean’, and in more recent literature this jargon has been replaced with the term ‘speaker meaning’. [ 13 ] After distinguishing between natural and (what we shall hereafter call) speaker meaning, Grice attempts to characterize the latter. It is not enough that I do something that influences the beliefs of an observer: In putting on a coat I might lead an observer to conclude that I am going for a walk. Yet in such a case it is not plausible that I mean that I am going for a walk in the sense germane to speaker meaning. Might performing an action with an intention of influencing someone’s beliefs be sufficient for speaker meaning? No: I might secretly leave Smith’s handkerchief at the crime scene to make the police think that Smith is the culprit. However, whether or not I am successful in getting the authorities to think that Smith is the culprit, in this case it is not plausible that I mean that Smith is the culprit.

What is missing in the handkerchief example is the element of overtness. This suggests another criterion: Performing an action with the, or an, intention of influencing someone’s beliefs, while intending that this very intention be recognized. Grice contends that even here we do not have enough for speaker meaning. Herod presents Salome with St. John’s severed head on a charger, intending that she discern that St. John is dead and intending that this very intention of his be recognized. Grice observes that in so doing Herod is not telling Salome anything, but is instead deliberately and openly letting her know something. Grice concludes that Herod’s action is not a case of speaker meaning either. The problem is not that Herod is not using words; we have already considered communicators who mean things wordlessly. The problem seems to be that to infer what Herod intends her to, Salome does not have to take his word for anything. She can see the severed head for herself if she can bring herself to look. By contrast, in its central uses, telling requires a speaker to intend to convey information (or alleged information) in a way that relies crucially upon taking her at her word. Grice appears to assume that at least for the case in which what is meant is a proposition (rather than a question or an imperative), speaker meaning requires a telling in this central sense. What is more, this last example is a case of performing an action with an intention of influencing someone’s beliefs, even while intending that this very intention be recognized; yet it is not a case of telling. Grice infers that it is not a case of speaker meaning either.

Grice holds that for speaker meaning to occur, not only must one (a) intend to produce an effect on an audience, and (b) intend that this very intention be recognized by that audience, but also (c) intend this effect on the audience to be produced at least in part by their recognition of the speaker’s intention. The intention to produce a belief or other attitude by means (at least in part) of recognition of this very intention, has come to be called a reflexive communicative intention .

It may be doubted that speaker meaning requires reflexive communicative intentions. After all, a mathematics teacher who proves a theorem T for her class likely wants her pupils to believe T on the strength of her proof rather than their recognition of her intention that they come to believe T. (Vlach 1981) It may even be doubted that speaker meaning requires intentions to produce cognitive effects on addressees at all: Davis (1992) provides a range of cases such as speaking to pre-linguistic infants, uncooperative photocopy machines, and photos of deceased loved ones. [ 14 ] , [ 15 ] Instead of intentions to produce psychological effects in an addressee, some authors have advocated a construal of speaker meaning as overtly manifesting an aspect of one’s commitments or state of mind (Green 2019). Compare my going to the closet to take out my overcoat (not a case of speaker meaning), with the following case: After heatedly arguing about the weather, I march to the closet while beadily meeting your stare, then storm out the front door while ostentatiously donning the coat. Here it is more plausible that I mean that it is raining outside, and the reason seems to be that I am making some attitude of mine overt: I am not only showing it, I am making clear my intention to do just that.

How does this detour through speaker meaning help to elucidate the notion of force? One way of asserting that P , it seems, is overtly to manifest my commitment to P , and indeed commitment of a particular kind: commitment to defend P in response to challenges of the form, “How do you know that?” I must also overtly manifest my liability to be either right or wrong on the issue of P depending on whether P is the case. By contrast, I conjecture P by overtly manifesting my commitment to P in this same “liability to error” way, but I am not committed to responding to challenges demanding full justification. I must, however, give some reason for believing P ; this much cannot, however, be said of a guess.

We perform a speech act, then, when we overtly commit ourselves in a certain way to a content—where that way is an aspect of how we speaker-mean that content. One way to do that is to invoke a convention for undertaking commitment; another way is overtly to manifest one’s intention to be so committed. We may elucidate the relevant forms of commitment by spelling out the norms underlying them. We have already adumbrated such an approach in our discussion of the differences among asserting and conjecturing. Developing that discussion a bit further, compare

conjecturing

All three of these acts have word-to-world direction of fit, and all three have conditions of satisfaction mandating that they are satisfied just in case the world is as their content says it is. Further, one who asserts, conjectures, or guesses that P is right or wrong on the issue of P depending on whether P is in fact so. However, as we move down the list we find a decreasing order of stringency in commitment. One who asserts P lays herself open to the challenge, “How do you know that?”, and she is obliged to retract P if she is unable to respond to that challenge adequately. By contrast, this challenge is inappropriate for either a conjecture or a guess. On the other hand, we may justifiably demand of the conjecturer that she give some reason for her conjecture; yet not even this much may be said of one who makes a guess. (The “educated guess” is intermediate between these two cases.)

This illocutionary dimension of speaker meaning characterizes not what is meant, but rather how it is meant. Just as we may consider your remark, directed toward me, “You’re tired,” and my remark, “I’m tired,” as having said the same thing but in different ways; so too we may consider my assertion of P , followed by a retraction and then followed by a conjecture of P , as two consecutive cases in which I speaker-mean that P but do so in different ways. This idea will be developed further in Section 8 under the rubric of “mode” of illocutionary commitment. [ 16 ]

Speaker meaning, then, encompasses not just content but also force, and we may elucidate this in light of the normative structure characteristic of each speech act: When you overtly display a commitment characteristic of that speech act, you have performed that speech act. Is this a necessary condition as well? That depends on whether I can perform a speech act without intending to do so—a topic for Section 9 below. For now, however, compare the view at which we have arrived with Searle’s view that one performs a speech act when others become aware of one’s intention to perform that act. What is missing from Searle’s characterization is the notion of overtness: The agent in question must not only make her intention to undertake a certain commitment manifest; she must also intend that that very intention be manifest. There is more to overtness than wearing one’s heart (or mind) on one’s sleeve.

6. Force, Norms, and Conversation

In elucidating this normative dimension of force, we have sought to characterize speech acts in terms of their conversational roles. That is not to say that speech acts can only be performed in the setting of a conversation: I can approach you, point out that your vehicle is blocking mine, and storm off. Here I have made an assertion but have not engaged in a conversation. Perhaps I can ask myself a question in the privacy of my study and leave it at that–not continuing into a conversation with myself. However, a speech act’s “ecological niche” may nevertheless be the conversation. In that spirit, while we may be able to remove a speech act type from its environment and scrutinize it in isolated captivity, doing so may blind us to some of its distinctive features.

This ecological analogy sheds light on a dispute over the question whether speech acts can profitably be studied in isolation from the conversations in which they occur. An empiricist framework, exemplified in John Stuart Mill’s A System of Logic , suggests attempting to discern the meaning of a word, for instance a proper name, in isolation. By contrast, Gottlob Frege (1884) enjoins us to understand a word’s meaning in terms of the contribution it makes to an entire sentence. Such a method is indispensable for a proper treatment of such expressions as quantifiers, and represents a major advance over empiricist approaches. Yet students of speech acts have espoused going even further, insisting that the unit of significance is not the proposition but the speech act. Vanderveken writes,

Illocutionary acts are important for the purpose of philosophical semantics because they are the primary units of meaning in the use and comprehension of natural language. (Vanderveken, 1990, p. 1.)

Why not go even further, since speech acts characteristically occur in conversations? Is the unit of significance really the debate, the colloquy, the interrogation?

Students of conversation analysis have contended precisely this, remarking that many speech acts fall naturally into pairs. [ 17 ] For instance, questions pair naturally with assertions when the latter purport to be answers to those questions. Likewise, offers pair naturally with acceptances or rejections, and it is easy to multiply examples. Searle, who favors studying speech acts in isolation, has replied to these considerations (Searle 1992). There he issues a challenge to students of conversation to provide an account of conversations parallel to that of speech acts, arguing as well that the prospects for such an account are dim. One of his reasons is that unlike speech acts conversations do not as such have a point or purpose. Green 1999 rejoins that many conversations may indeed be construed in teleological terms. For instance, many conversations may be construed as aimed at answering a question, even when that question concerns something as banal as the afternoon’s weather or the location of the nearest subway station. Asher and Lascardes (2003) develop a systematic treatment of speech acts in their conversational setting that also responds to Searle’s challenge. Additionally, Roberts (2004, 2012) develops a model of conversational kinematics according to which conversations are invariably aimed at answering what she terms a question under discussion (QUD). This view is best appreciated within the framework of the “scorekeeping model” of conversation, to which we now turn.

Much literature concerned with speech acts is curiously disconnected from research in the semantics of natural language emphasizing pragmatic factors. For instance, Stalnaker (1972, 1973, 1974), Lewis (1979, 1980), Thomason (1990) and others have developed models of the kinematics of conversations aimed at understanding the role of quantification, presupposition (both semantic and pragmatic), anaphora, deixis, and vagueness in discourse. Such models typically construe conversations as involving an ever-developing set of Propositions that can be presupposed by interlocutors. This set of Propositions is the conversational common ground , defined as that set of Propositions that all interlocutors take to be true, while also taking it that all other interlocutors take them to be true. If a Proposition p is in a conversation’s common ground, then a speaker may felicitously presuppose p’s truth. Suppose then that the Proposition that Singapore has a unique King is in a conversation’s common ground at given point; then a speaker may felicitously utter a sentence such as ‘The present King of Singapore is wise,’ or ‘Singapore’s king is sleeping’. Other parameters characterizing a conversation at a given point include the domain of discourse, a set of salient perceptible objects, standards of precision, time, world or situation, speaker, and addressee. The set of all values for these items at a given conversational moment is often referred to as “conversational score”.

“Scorekeeping” approaches to language use typically construe a contribution to a conversation as a Proposition: If that “assertion” is accepted, then the score is updated by having the Proposition entered into common ground. In this spirit, MacFarlane (2011) considers an account of the speech act of assertion in terms an utterance’s capacity to update conversational score. Such an approach will, however, face a difficulty in explaining how two speech acts with the same content, such as an assertion that the Milky Way contains a black hole, and a conjecture that it does, will make different conversational contributions. An enrichment of the scorekeeping model would include sensitivity to differences such as these.

Another development in the scorekeeping model refines the teleological picture adumbrated above to incorporate Questions, construed (along the lines of Section 2.1) as sets of Propositions. When an interlocutor proffers an assertion that is not met with objections by others in the conversation, the Propositional content of that illocution will enter into common ground. When an interlocutor poses a question that is accepted by others, we may represent the change as an addition to Common Ground of the set of propositions that is the Interrogative content of that illocution. The presence of that Interrogative obliges interlocutors to work to rule all but one Proposition that is a complete answer to the Interrogative. Because Interrogatives stand in inferential relations to one another (Q1 entails Q2 just in case any answer to Q1 is an answer to Q2), one strategy for answering a question is to divide it into tractable questions that it entails: ‘How many covered bridges are there in Japan?’ can be answered by answering that question for each of that country’s 47 prefectures. Roberts (2004, 2012) develops the Question Under Discussion model of conversational dynamics according to which common ground contains a partially ordered set of Interrogatives in addition to a set of Propositions. This teleological approach to conversation bids fair to enrich our understanding of the relations of speech acts to other central topics within pragmatics such as presupposition and implicature. [ 18 ]

Frege’s Begriffsschrift (1879) constitutes history’s first thoroughgoing attempt to formulate a rigorous formal system in which to carry out deductive reasoning. However, Frege did not see his Begriffsschrift as merely a tool for assessing the validity of arguments. Rather, he appears to have seen it as an organon for the acquisition of knowledge from unquestionable first principles; in addition he wanted to use it in order to help make clear the epistemic foundations on which our knowledge rests. To this end his formal system contains not only symbols indicating the content of propositions (including logical constants), but also symbols indicating the force with which they are put forth. In particular, Frege insists that when using his formal system to acquire new knowledge from propositions already known, we use an assertion sign to indicate our acknowledgment of the truth of the proposition used as axioms or inferred therefrom. Frege thus employs what would now be called a force indicator : an expression whose use indicates the force with which an associated proposition is being put forth (Green 2002).

Reichenbach expands upon Frege’s idea in his 1947. In addition to using an assertion sign, Reichenbach also uses indicators of interrogative and imperatival force. Hare similarly introduces force indicators to lay bare the way in which ethical and cognate utterances are made (Hare 1970). Davidson (1979), however, challenges the value of this entire enterprise of introducing force-indicating devices into languages, formal or otherwise. Davidson’s reason is that since natural language already contains many devices for indicating the force of one’s speech act, the only interest a force indicator could have would be if it could guarantee the force of one’s speech act. But nothing could do this: Any device purporting to be, say, an infallible indicator of assertoric force is liable to being used by a joker or actor to heighten the realism of their performance. Referring to the putative force-indicating device as a ‘strengthened mood,’ he writes,

It is apparent that merely speaking the sentence in the strengthened mood cannot be counted on to result in an assertion: every joker, storyteller, and actor will immediately take advantage of the strengthened mood to simulate assertion. There is no point, then, in the strengthened mood; the available indicative does as well as language can do in the service of assertion (Davidson 1979, p. 311).

Hare 1989 replies that there could be a society with a convention that utterance of a certain expression constituted performance of a certain illocutionary act, even those utterances that occur on stage or as used by jokers or storytellers. Green 1997 questions the relevance of this observation to asserting, which as we have seen, which as we have seen, seem to require intentions for their performance. Just as no convention could make it the case that I believe that P , so too no convention could make it the case that I intend to put forth a certain sentence as an assertion.

On the other hand, Green 1997 and Green 2000 also observe that even if there can be no force indicator in the sense Davidson criticizes, nothing prevents natural language from containing devices that indicate force conditional upon one’s performing a speech act: such a force indicator would not show whether one is performing a speech act, but, given that one is doing so, it would show which speech act one is performing. For instance, parenthetical expressions such as, ‘as is the case’ can occur in the antecedent of conditionals, as in: ‘If, as is the case, the globe is warming, then Antarctica will melt.’ Use of the parenthetical cannot guarantee that the sentence or any part of it is being asserted, but if the entire sentence is being asserted, then, Green claims, use of the parenthetical guarantees that the speaker is also committed to the content of the antecedent. If this claim is correct, natural language already contains force indicators in this qualified sense. Whether it is worth introducing such force indicators into a logical notation remains an open question.

Subsequent to Austin’s introduction of the notion of a performative, it has also been suggested that what we might call performative sentential frames behave like force indicators: ‘I claim that it is sunny,’ seems to be a prolix way of saying that it is sunny, where the ‘I claim’ seems only to indicate how what follows is to be taken. On the approach of Urmson (1952), for instance, such a sentence should be understood on the model of ‘It is sunny, I claim.’ Support for such an analysis may be found in the fact that a potential reply to that utterance is ‘No it isn’t; it’s pouring outside!’, while ‘No you don’t’ is not. Again, if the speaker does not believe it is sunny outside, she cannot dodge, she cannot dodge the accusation of lying by remarking that what she had asserted was that she claimed that it is sunny, and not anything about the weather.

Nonetheless, drawing on Cohen 1964, Lycan 2018 objects to the view that such performative frames make no contribution to sentence or utterance meaning. If Marissa felicitously utters, ‘I claim that it is sunny,’ while Abdul felicitously utters, ‘I conjecture that it is sunny,’ the view implies that their utterances mean the same. The two speakers have clearly said different things, however. On the other hand, if we hold that the performative frame does contribute to the content of what Marissa and Abdul said, then, Lycan points out, it will be difficult to explain how their utterances commit either of them to any position about the weather. It evidently won’t do to posit inference rules such as ‘I state that p ,‘ ergo , ‘ p ’. We will consider a solution to what Lycan terms “Cohen’s Problem” after developing a notion of illocutionary inference in the next section.

Students of speech acts contend, as we have seen, that the unit of communicative significance is the Illocution rather than the Proposition. This attitude prompts the question whether logic itself might be enriched by incorporating inferential relations among speech acts rather than just inferential relations among Propositions. Just as two event-types E 1 and E 2 (such as running quickly and running) could be logically related to one another in that it is not possible for one to occur without the other; so too speech act types S 1 and S 2 could be inferentially related to one another if it is not possible to perform one without performing the other. A warning that the bull is about to charge is also an assertion that the bull is about to charge but the converse is not true. This is in spite of the fact that these two speech acts have the same propositional content: That the bull is about to charge. If, therefore, warning implies asserting but not vice versa, then that inferential relation is not to be caught within the net of inferential relations among propositions.

In their Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (1985), Searle and Vanderveken attempt a general treatment of logical relations among speech acts. They describe their central question in terms of commitment:

A theory of illocutionary logic of the sort we are describing is essentially a theory of illocutionary commitment as determined by illocutionary force. The single most important question it must answer is this: Given that a speaker in a certain context of utterance performs a successful illocutionary act of a certain form, what other illocutions does the performance of that act commit him to? (1985, p. 6)

To explicate their notion of illocutionary commitment, these authors invoke their definition of illocutionary force in terms of the seven values mentioned in Section 2.3 above. On the basis of this definition, they define two notions pertinent to entailment relations among speech acts, namely strong illocutionary commitment and weak illocutionary commitment . According to the former definition, an illocutionary act S 1 commits a speaker to another illocutionary act S 2 iff it is not possible to perform S 1 without performing S 2 . Whether that relation holds between a pair of illocutionary acts depends on the particular septuples with which they are identified. Thus suppose that S 1 is identical with <IP 1 , Str 1 , Mode 1 , Cont 1 , Prep 1 , Sinc 1 , Stresinc 1 > (corresponding to illocutionary point, strength, mode of achievement, propositional content, preparatory condition, sincerity condition, and strength of sincerity condition, respectively); and suppose that S 2 is identical with <IP 1 , Str 2 , Mode 1 , Cont 1 , Prep 1 , Sinc 1 , Stresinc 1 >. Suppose further that Str 1 and Str 2 differ only in that 1 is stronger than 2. Then it will not be possible to perform S 1 without performing S 2 ; whence the former strongly illocutionarily implies the latter. (This definition of strong illocutionary commitment generalizes in a straightforward way to the case in which a set of speech acts S 1 , …, S n −1 implies a speech act S n .)

Searle and Vanderveken also define a notion of weak illocutionary commitment such that S 1 weakly illocutionarily implies S 2 iff every performance of S 1 commits an agent to meeting the conditions laid down in the septuple identical to S 2 (1985, p. 24). Searle and Vanderveken infer that this implies that if P logically entails Q , and an agent asserts P , then she is committed to believing that Q . These authors stress, however, that this does not mean that the agent who asserts P is committed to cultivating the belief Q when P implies Q . In lieu of that explication, however, it is unclear just what notion of commitment is at issue. It is unclear, for instance, what it could mean to be committed to believing Q (rather than just being committed to Q ) if this is not to be explicated as being committed to cultivating the belief that Q .

Other approaches attempt to circumvent such problems by reductively defining the notion of commitment in terms of obligations to action and liability to error and/or vindication. Performance of a speech act or set of speech acts can commit an agent to a distinct content, and do so relative to some force. If P and Q jointly imply R , then my asserting both P and Q commits me to R . That is not to say that I have also asserted R : if assertion were closed under deductive consequence I would assert infinitely many things just by virtue of asserting one. By contrast, if I conjecture P and Q , then I am once again committed to R but not in the way that I would have been had I asserted P and Q . For instance, in the assertion case, once my further commitment to R is made clear, it is within the rights of my addressee to ask how I know that R holds; this would not have been an acceptable reply to my merely conjecturing P and Q . Developing this theme, let S be an arbitrary speaker, <Δ l A l , …, Δ n A n , Δ B > a sequence of force/content pairs; then:

<Δ l A l , …, Δ n A n , Δ B > is illocutionarily valid iff if speaker S is committed to each A i under mode Δ i , then S is committed to B under mode Δ. [ 19 ]

Because it concerns what force/content pairs commit an agent to what others, illocutionary validity is an essentially deontic notion: It will be cashed out in terms either of obligation to use a content in a certain way conversationally, or liability to error or vindication depending upon how the world is.

Our discussion of the possibility of an illocutionary logic answers one question posed at the end of Section 6.3, namely whether it is possible to perform a speech act without intending to do so. This seems likely given Searle and Vanderveken’s definition of strong illocutionary commitment: We need only imagine an agent performing some large number of speech acts, S 1 , …, S n −1 , which, unbeknownst to her, jointly guarantee that she fulfills the seven conditions defining another speech act S n . Even in such a case she performs S n only by virtue of intentionally performing some other set of speech acts S 1 , …, S n −1 ; it is difficult to see how one can perform S n while having no intention of performing a speech act at all.

We are also in a position to make headway on Cohen’s Problem as formulated by Lycan. As argued in Green 2000, in an assertion of ‘I (hereby) assert that p ’, a speaker commits herself to p even though her words do not logically entail that Proposition; nor do they presuppose, or either conversationally or conventionally imply it. They do, however, illocutionarily entail it: anyone committed to ‘I assert that p ’ assertorically is thereby committed to p assertorically. By contrast, one committed to ‘I assert that p ’ as a supposition for the sake of argument is not thereby committed to p . Accordingly, such a phrase as ‘I assert that’ is semantically opaque (making a non-trivial contribution to the truth conditions of the sentences in which it occurs) but pragmatically transparent in the sense that a speaker who undertakes assertoric commitment to a sentence in which it has widest scope is also assertorically committed to its complement. Analogous remarks apply to ‘I conjecture that’ and the like.

In a paradigmatic illocutionary event, a speaker has a choice of which if any speech act to perform and her addressee will do her charitable best to discern that speaker’s intentions and, where necessary, which conventions she may be invoking. Pratt (1986) observes that this paradigm is not true to the facts of many areas of communicative life, writing

An account of linguistic interaction based on the idea of exchange glosses over the very basic facts that, to put it crudely, some people get to do more talking than others, some are supposed to do more listening, and not everybody’s words are worth the same. (1986, p. 68)

Although Pratt intends this remark as a critique of speech act theory, it also suggests a way in which this theory might shed light on subtle forms of oppression. We saw in Section 2.2 that a putative bet can misfire if it is not accepted. In such a case the speaker attempts to bet but fails in that effort due to a lack of audience uptake. So too, a person may not be in the correct social position to, say, excommunicate or appoint, and her attempts to perform such illocutions will misfire. More momentously, a pattern of abuses of speech act institutions might deprive a person of an ability to perform speech acts: the inveterate promise-breaker will, in time, lead others in his community to be unwilling to accept any promises he tries to make. He can perform countless locutionary acts but will be unable to perform the illocutionary act of promising, at least in this community.

A pattern of culpable behavior could make a speaker unable to perform one speech act type. Could a pattern of culpable behavior–intentional or inadvertent—on the part of others in a speaker’s community achieve the same effect? This could happen if enough such speakers decide never to accept one person’s bets, warnings, or promises. Beyond such hypothetical cases, it has been argued that patterns of social inequality can prevent members of certain groups from performing the speech acts they would choose to. Building on and refining McKinnon’s (1993) claim that pornography silences women, Langton (1993), and Hornsby and Langton (1998) argue that the industry and consumption of pornography deprive women of the ability to perform the speech act of refusing sexual advances. Refusing is a speech act, but if large enough numbers of men deny uptake (with such thoughts as, “By ‘no’ she really means ‘yes’,” etc.) then, these authors argue, women’s attempts to refuse sexual advances will be characteristically inert with respect to the speech act of refusal. Women will still be able to attempt to refuse sexual advances, and can still try to prevent them by physical means, but a crucial illocutionary form of protection will be closed to them. So too, apartheid, Jim Crow, and even patterns of discrimination of which the perpetrators are not consciously aware, can deprive racial, religious, and ethnic minority groups of the ability to perform speech-act types requiring uptake. These phenomena are generally referred to as illocutionary silencing .

Bird (2002) denies that the speech act of refusal requires uptake. Such an illocution is, he contends, like inviting and surrendering, which can occur whether or not their intended audiences grasp or accept the proffered illocutions. Similarly denying that the “silencing” argument should be cast in terms of speech acts, Maitra 2009 argues that the institution of pornography prevents speaker-meant instances of refusal from being understood. One can speaker-mean that she refuses, for instance, but patterns of cognitive and affective response will systematically prevent that refusal from being grasped. Broadening the scope of investigations of the interaction of injustice and illocutionary phenomena, McGowan 2009 argues that some speech acts can not only cause but also constitute instances of oppression. Anderson, Haslanger and Langton (2012) provide overviews of research on racial, gender and related forms of oppression as they relate to speech acts.

Although not inherently culpable, the practice of dogwhistling has also recently gained the interest of theorists of speech acts. As suggested by the metaphor, an agent dogwhistles just in case one or more dimensions of a speech act she performs is readily intelligible only to a proper subset of her addressees. Saul 2018 notes that in contemporary American politics, stating one’s opposition to the Supreme Court case of Dred Scott seems to be a way of signaling one’s anti-abortion sympathies. For those not in the know, however, a speaker’s opposition to the Dred Scott appears to be an uncontroversial act of rejecting racism. The phenomenon of dogwhistling provides an apparent challenge to conceptions of speaker meaning in terms of overtness, since the dogwhistler would seem to speaker mean a content that is cryptic to all but her insider audience: is her utterance both overt and covert? Instead of adopting such a view, one who construes speech acts in terms of overtness could refine the notion of manifestness occuring in her account. What is manifest to one addressee may not be manifest to another, and a speaker may exploit this fact. Accordingly, someone who avows, “I’m against Dred Scott,” may speaker-mean that she is both against Dred Scott and pro-life to one part of her audience, but only that she is against Dred Scott to another part.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

Research project in the philosophy of language , maintained at the University of Berne, Switzerland. This site is devoted to some main themes of research stemming from Grices’ work on speaker meaning and implicature.
Working Papers in Linguistics , University College London.
Question Under Discussion , collecting research germane to this approach to conversational kinematics. .
‘ Toward a history of speech act theory ,’ a paper by Barry Smith (SUNY/Buffalo).
‘ J.L. Austin ,’ an annotated bibliography by Guy Longworth, Oxford Bibliographies Online .
‘ Pragmatics ,’ an annotated bibliography by Mitchell S. Green, Oxford Bibliographies Online .

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The 9 Parts of Speech: Definitions and Examples

Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
B.A., English, State University of New York

A part of speech is a term used in traditional grammar for one of the nine main categories into which words are classified according to their functions in sentences, such as nouns or verbs. Also known as word classes, these are the building blocks of grammar.

Every sentence you write or speak in English includes words that fall into some of the nine parts of speech. These include nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, articles/determiners, and interjections. (Some sources include only eight parts of speech and leave interjections in their own category.)

Parts of Speech

Word types can be divided into nine parts of speech:
prepositions
conjunctions
articles/determiners
interjections
Some words can be considered more than one part of speech, depending on context and usage.
Interjections can form complete sentences on their own.

Learning the names of the parts of speech probably won't make you witty, healthy, wealthy, or wise. In fact, learning just the names of the parts of speech won't even make you a better writer. However, you will gain a basic understanding of sentence structure and the English language by familiarizing yourself with these labels.

Open and Closed Word Classes

The parts of speech are commonly divided into open classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) and closed classes (pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, articles/determiners, and interjections). Open classes can be altered and added to as language develops, and closed classes are pretty much set in stone. For example, new nouns are created every day, but conjunctions never change.

In contemporary linguistics , parts of speech are generally referred to as word classes or syntactic categories. The main difference is that word classes are classified according to more strict linguistic criteria. Within word classes, there is the lexical, or open class, and the function, or closed class.

The 9 Parts of Speech

Read about each part of speech below, and practice identifying each.

Nouns are a person, place, thing, or idea. They can take on a myriad of roles in a sentence, from the subject of it all to the object of an action. They are capitalized when they're the official name of something or someone, and they're called proper nouns in these cases. Examples: pirate, Caribbean, ship, freedom, Captain Jack Sparrow.

Pronouns stand in for nouns in a sentence . They are more generic versions of nouns that refer only to people. Examples: I, you, he, she, it, ours, them, who, which, anybody, ourselves.

Verbs are action words that tell what happens in a sentence. They can also show a sentence subject's state of being ( is , was ). Verbs change form based on tense (present, past) and count distinction (singular or plural). Examples: sing, dance, believes, seemed, finish, eat, drink, be, became.

Adjectives describe nouns and pronouns. They specify which one, how much, what kind, and more. Adjectives allow readers and listeners to use their senses to imagine something more clearly. Examples: hot, lazy, funny, unique, bright, beautiful, poor, smooth.

Adverbs describe verbs, adjectives, and even other adverbs. They specify when, where, how, and why something happened and to what extent or how often. Many adjectives can be turned into adjectives by adding the suffix - ly . Examples: softly, quickly, lazily, often, only, hopefully, sometimes.

Preposition

Prepositions show spatial, temporal, and role relations between a noun or pronoun and the other words in a sentence. They come at the start of a prepositional phrase , which contains a preposition and its object. Examples: up, over, against, by, for, into, close to, out of, apart from.

Conjunction

Conjunctions join words, phrases, and clauses in a sentence. There are coordinating, subordinating, and correlative conjunctions. Examples: and, but, or, so, yet.

Articles and Determiners

Articles and determiners function like adjectives by modifying nouns, but they are different than adjectives in that they are necessary for a sentence to have proper syntax. Articles and determiners specify and identify nouns, and there are indefinite and definite articles. Examples of articles: a, an, the ; examples of determiners: these, that, those, enough, much, few, which, what.

Some traditional grammars have treated articles as a distinct part of speech. Modern grammars, however, more often include articles in the category of determiners , which identify or quantify a noun. Even though they modify nouns like adjectives, articles are different in that they are essential to the proper syntax of a sentence, just as determiners are necessary to convey the meaning of a sentence, while adjectives are optional.

Interjection

Interjections are expressions that can stand on their own or be contained within sentences. These words and phrases often carry strong emotions and convey reactions. Examples: ah, whoops, ouch, yabba dabba do!

How to Determine the Part of Speech

Only interjections ( Hooray! ) have a habit of standing alone; every other part of speech must be contained within a sentence and some are even required in sentences (nouns and verbs). Other parts of speech come in many varieties and may appear just about anywhere in a sentence.

To know for sure what part of speech a word falls into, look not only at the word itself but also at its meaning, position, and use in a sentence.

For example, in the first sentence below, work functions as a noun; in the second sentence, a verb; and in the third sentence, an adjective:

Bosco showed up for work two hours late.
The noun work is the thing Bosco shows up for.
He will have to work until midnight.
The verb work is the action he must perform.
His work permit expires next month.
The attributive noun (or converted adjective) work modifies the noun permit .

Learning the names and uses of the basic parts of speech is just one way to understand how sentences are constructed.

Dissecting Basic Sentences

To form a basic complete sentence, you only need two elements: a noun (or pronoun standing in for a noun) and a verb. The noun acts as a subject, and the verb, by telling what action the subject is taking, acts as the predicate.

In the short sentence above, birds is the noun and fly is the verb. The sentence makes sense and gets the point across.

You can have a sentence with just one word without breaking any sentence formation rules. The short sentence below is complete because it's a verb command with an understood "you" noun.

Here, the pronoun, standing in for a noun, is implied and acts as the subject. The sentence is really saying, "(You) go!"

Constructing More Complex Sentences

Use more parts of speech to add additional information about what's happening in a sentence to make it more complex. Take the first sentence from above, for example, and incorporate more information about how and why birds fly.

Birds fly when migrating before winter.

Birds and fly remain the noun and the verb, but now there is more description.

When is an adverb that modifies the verb fly. The word before is a little tricky because it can be either a conjunction, preposition, or adverb depending on the context. In this case, it's a preposition because it's followed by a noun. This preposition begins an adverbial phrase of time ( before winter ) that answers the question of when the birds migrate . Before is not a conjunction because it does not connect two clauses.

What Are Word Blends?
Figure of Speech: Definition and Examples
Definition and Examples of Adjectives
Subjects, Verbs, and Objects
What Is a Rhetorical Device? Definition, List, Examples
What Is The Speech Act Theory: Definition and Examples
A List of Exclamations and Interjections in English
What Is Nonverbal Communication?
Examples and Usage of Conjunctions in English Grammar
Linguistic Variation
Definition and Examples of Interjections in English
Definition and Examples of Jargon
Understanding the Types of Verbs in English Grammar
Complementary vs. Complimentary: How to Choose the Right Word
Basic Grammar: What Is a Diphthong?
Subordinating Conjunctions

Cambridge Dictionary +Plus

Meaning of direction in English

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direction noun ( POSITION )

We felt the plane bank steeply as it changed direction.
Why will supermarket trolleys never move in the direction that you push them in?
I was waving my hand madly but he never once looked in my direction.
When he asked where the children were, she gestured vaguely in the direction of the beach .
From the top , we could see for miles in every direction.
against the current
circumduction
cross-country
direction of travel
multidirectional
the right/wrong/other way around idiom

direction noun ( CONTROL )

administration
anti-bureaucracy
bronze command
get your act together idiom
gold command
have something in hand idiom
have/get your shit together idiom
party planning
project-manage
rationalization
rationalize
recentralization
remobilization

You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

direction noun ( DEVELOPMENT )

Direction | intermediate english, examples of direction, collocations with direction.

These are words often used in combination with direction .

Click on a collocation to see more examples of it.

Translations of direction

Get a quick, free translation!

Word of the Day

out of harm's way

in a position that is safe from harm or from which harm cannot be done

Trial, judge, and jury: talking about what happens when a criminal is caught

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direction (POSITION)
in someone's direction
sense of direction
direction (CONTROL)
direction (DEVELOPMENT)
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Prepositions of Direction: Definition, Usage, and Examples

February 21, 2024

Karoline Chaplin

In English grammar, prepositions serve a critical role in conveying relationships between elements in sentences. Prepositions of direction specifically guide us in expressing movement or orientation within different contexts.

In this article we provide the definition, usage, and examples of these prepositions to enhance your understanding of this linguistic concept.

What are Prepositions of Direction?

Prepositions of direction are words that help indicate the movement or orientation of one element in relation to another. They offer valuable insights into the direction of motion , contributing to clarity in communication.

What are Common Prepositions of Direction?

Here are some commonly used prepositions of direction:

Movement toward a specific place or person.

Example: She walked to the store.

Denoting the starting point of movement or direction.

Example: The plane is arriving from Paris.

Expressing movement towards the interior of a place or object.

Example: The explorers ventured into the mysterious cave.

Similar to “into,” implying movement onto a surface.

Example: The acrobat gracefully leaped onto the tightrope.

Signifying movement away from a particular point or surface.

Example: The cat jumped off the table.

Indicating movement in the direction of something.

Example: She walked towards the store.

Implies movement from one side or end to another.

Example: The river flows through the heart of the city.

Table for Prepositions of Direction:

Here is a table for better understanding:

Preposition	Definition	Example Sentence
To	Movement in the direction of a place or person.	She walked to the store.
From	Denotes the starting point of movement.	The plane is arriving from Paris.
Into	Movement towards the interior of a place/object.	The explorers ventured into the mysterious cave.
Onto	Movement onto a surface.	The acrobat gracefully leaped onto the tightrope.
Off	Movement away from a point or surface.	The cat jumped off the table.
Towards	Movement in the direction of something.	She walked towards the store.
Through	Movement from one side or end to another.	The river flows through the heart of the city.

What are Prepositions of Direction in English Grammar?

Prepositions of direction in English grammar guide the expression of movement or orientation between elements in sentences. Common examples include “to,” indicating movement toward a place, and “from,” denoting the starting point of movement. Explore their definitions and usage for enhanced linguistic clarity.

Conclusion:

Comprehending prepositions of direction is crucial for effective communication in English. By understanding their definition, usage, and examples, you can articulate movement and direction more precisely. Integrating these prepositions into your language skills will undoubtedly enhance your ability to convey spatial relationships in a clear and straightforward manner.

Prepositions of Location: Its Definition, Usage and Example
Prepositions of Place: Usage, Rules, and Examples
What Are Prepositions of Movement and how do you use them?
Prepositions of Manner: What They Are and How to Use Them
Preposition of Time: Their Definition, Usage, and Examples

Coordinating Conjunctions (FANBOYS): Its Usage and Examples

What is Preposition of Measure and how do you use them?

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Parts of Speech Directions For each parts of
"How to" Demonstration Speech directions, outline, and rubric by Robyn R
Following Directions Speech Therapy Activities

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Types of Directions
The first two types of directions are verbal vs. written. They mean exactly what you think. Written directions are given in writing (i.e., reading directions to a board game, reading a recipe). Verbal directions are given verbally (i.e., a teacher telling students instructions to complete an assignment, a caregiver telling a child to clean ...
Handy Handout #223: Different Ways of Following Directions
Different Ways of Following Directions. by Kevin Stuckey, M.Ed., CCC-SLP and Susie S. Loraine, M.A., CCC-SLP. Verbal (spoken) directions are a part of everyday life for adults and children. Appropriate behavior, social interaction, and academic success are all dependent on the ability to understand and follow verbal directions.
PDF Just for Adults Following Directions
Following directions is an integral part of our daily communication and functioning. We have to follow directions in various ways for a multitude of activities every day. We follow directions when we use a recipe, carry out the responsibilities of a job, build something, pay our bills, drive to a new location, and so on.
Following Directions: Step By Step Guide
Great for parents, teachers, and speech-language pathologists. In this episode of the Speech and Language Kids Podcast, I give you a step-by-step guide to getting your child understanding and following directions. And in the Quick Tip, I tell you about a Facebook Group where you can connect with me and fellow parents and professionals who work ...
Following Directions For Toddlers
Attempt 3: Tell your child the direction again, this time pointing directly to their cup and gesturing with your hands for them to bring it to you. Attempt 4: Finally, ask your child to complete the direction one more time. As you say "Bring me your cup," give them the cup and help them hand it back to you.
Navigating the Classroom: A Comprehensive Following Directions Lesson
Following directions refers to the ability to understand and carry out instructions accurately and efficiently. It involves listening, comprehending, and executing tasks in a timely manner. This skill is essential for academic success, as it is required in various subjects such as math, science, and language arts.
Following Directions in Speech Therapy
The ability to follow directions is often worked on in speech therapy. Children are asked to follow directions in their everyday lives. In order to follow directions, the child requires a strong knowledge of basic concepts and the ability to process and retain auditory information. From the time they are babies, we give children clues when we speak such as pointing, looking at an object and ...
Lesson Plan: Following Directions
Boy1: (directions steps breakdown: 1. Worksheets in bin 2. Books on the shelf 3. Line up) Narrator: Then, repeat the key steps to yourself one or two times. Boy1: (directions steps breakdown review) Narrator: Get going right away on the first step. It's never a good habit to avoid work.
Receptive Language and Speech Therapy
Receptive language is the language that we understand. When we are listening to someone speak or when we read, we are using our receptive language skills. We will talk about how phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics play a role in receptive language. Language consists of receptive and expressive language.
Prompting in Speech Therapy: Quick Tips for How to ...
It involves moving your hand to indicate a specific object or area . For example, the SLP says, "Put the toy on the shelf." while gesturing toward the shelf. 4. Looking/nodding. This involves looking or nodding in the direction of the correct response . You may use this to encourage a child to follow directions.
Age-Appropriate Speech and Language Milestones
Vocalizes pleasure and displeasure sounds differently (laughs, giggles, cries, or fusses) Makes noise when talked to. 6 to 11 months. Understands "no-no". Babbles (says "ba-ba-ba") Says "ma-ma" or "da-da" without meaning. Tries to communicate by actions or gestures. Tries to repeat your sounds. Says first word.
14.1 Four Methods of Delivery
Key Takeaways. There are four main kinds of speech delivery: impromptu, extemporaneous, manuscript, and memorized. Impromptu speaking involves delivering a message on the spur of the moment, as when someone is asked to "say a few words.". Extemporaneous speaking consists of delivering a speech in a conversational fashion using notes.
Direction Definition & Meaning
direction: [noun] guidance or supervision of action or conduct : management.
Expressive vs. Receptive Language
Receptive language is the "input" of language, the ability to understand and comprehend spoken language that you hear or read. For example, a child's ability to listen and follow directions (e.g. "put on your coat") relies on the child's receptive language skills. In typical development, children are able to understand language ...
9.4 Outlining
There are principles of outlining you can follow to make your outlining process more efficient and effective. Four principles of outlining are consistency, unity, coherence, and emphasis (DuBois, 1929). In terms of consistency, you should follow standard outlining format. In standard outlining format, main points are indicated by capital roman ...
Stage directions and drama terms
Enter: Stage direction indicating the entrance onto the stage of a character or characters. Exit: Stage direction indicating the departure of a character from the stage. Monologue: A long dramatic speech by a single actor. Prologue: The introduction of a play. Protagonist: The main character. Scene: The part of an act that takes place in one ...
DIRECTION Definition & Meaning
Direction definition: the act or an instance of directing. . See examples of DIRECTION used in a sentence.
The 8 Parts of Speech
A part of speech (also called a word class) is a category that describes the role a word plays in a sentence.Understanding the different parts of speech can help you analyze how words function in a sentence and improve your writing. The parts of speech are classified differently in different grammars, but most traditional grammars list eight parts of speech in English: nouns, pronouns, verbs ...
Speech Acts
The latter (but not the former) is a case of speaker meaning. Accordingly, a speech act is a type of act that can be performed by speaker meaning that one is doing so. This conception still counts resigning, promising, asserting and asking as speech acts, while ruling out convincing, insulting and whispering.
The 9 Parts of Speech: Definitions and Examples
Also known as word classes, these are the building blocks of grammar. Every sentence you write or speak in English includes words that fall into some of the nine parts of speech. These include nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, articles/determiners, and interjections. (Some sources include only eight parts ...
2. DIRECTIVES AS SPEECH ACTS
a proper definition. In the first section of this chapter I will attempt to characterize this concept more clearly, by stating the view of language which it represents and ... viz. directive speech acts, to which the rest of this chapter will be devoted. Section 2.2 focuses on directives as a type of speech act and discusses the characteristics ...
DIRECTION
DIRECTION meaning: 1. the position towards which someone or something moves or faces: 2. instructions that you give…. Learn more.
Prepositions of Direction: Definition, Usage, and Examples
Prepositions of direction in English grammar guide the expression of movement or orientation between elements in sentences. Common examples include "to," indicating movement toward a place, and "from," denoting the starting point of movement. Explore their definitions and usage for enhanced linguistic clarity.

Types of Directions

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Following Directions in Speech Therapy

What Is An Information-Carrying Word?

0 information-carrying words

1 information-carrying word

2 information-carrying words

3 information-carrying words

How many information-carrying words should a child understand?

Comprehension Check

Object Size & Colour - Information-Carrying Words

Before & After - Temporal Directions

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What is Receptive Language?

Receptive Language and the Five Domains of Language

Receptive Language and Phonology

Receptive Language and Morphology

Receptive Language and Syntax (Grammar)

Receptive Language and Semantics

Receptive Language and Pragmatics

Receptive Language Resources

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Prompting in Speech Therapy: Quick Tips for How to Use Gestural Prompts

WHAT IS IT?

TYPES OF GESTURAL PROMPTS

1. Modeling

2. Pointing

3. Hand gestures

4. Looking/nodding

5. Iconic gestures

6. Phonemic supports

IMPORTANT THINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN USING GESTURES

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Milestones related to speech and language

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14.1 Four Methods of Delivery

Impromptu Speaking

Extemporaneous Speaking

Speaking from a Manuscript

Speaking from Memory

Key Takeaways

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Definition of direction

Examples of direction in a Sentence

Word History

Phrases Containing direction

Dictionary Entries Near direction

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Expressive vs. Receptive Language

Erin Vollmer MS, CCC-SLP

Why is expressive and receptive language development important?

What is receptive language?

What is expressive language?

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