Home

>

Classification of Click Acts

Searle, a student of Austin, formalized Austin's work, building rules for speech acts and defining indirect speech acts. According to Searle, speech acts can be categorized as follows (Saeed 212):

• representatives, expressing the truth, for example asserting,
• directives, trying to get the hearer to do something, for example requesting,
• commissives, stating a commitment of the speaker, for example promising,
• expressives, expressing a psychological state, for example apologising,
• declarations, which have an influence on the future, for example marrying.

Obviously, all click acts examined in the previous section belong to the category of directives, since almost all click acts result in an action performed by the computer system. While users may wish to perform another type of action, this is not possible since all user utterances are predefined.⁵²
Apart from the categorization of speech acts, Searle developed felicity conditions for every category of speech acts; see table 2 for the felicity conditions of the illocutionary act of requesting.

 

Table: Searle's Felicity Conditions for the Illocutionary Act of Requesting. Source: Searle 60

Propositional content	Future act A of hearer H.
Preparatory	1. H is able to do A. Speaker S believes H is able to do A. 2. It is not obvious to both to both S and H that H will do A in the normal course of events of his own accord.
Sincerity	S wants H to do A.
Essential	Counts as an attempt to get H to do A.
Comment:	Order and command have the additional preparatory rule that S must be in a position of authority over H. Command probably does not have the 'pragmatic' condition requiring non-obviousness. Furthermore in both, the authority relationship infects the essential condition because the utterance counts as an attempt to get H to do A in virtue of the authority of S over H.

Applying these conditions to a click act, the following can be stated:

Propositional content
Future action A of computer system

Preparatory

1.

The computer system is able to do A. The user believes that the computer is able to do A.

2.

It is not obvious to both user and computer system that the system will do A in the normal course of events of its own accord.

Sincerity
The user wants the computer to do A.

Essential
The utterance can be regarded as an attempt to get the computer to do A.

Mention must be made of the similarity of a request and a command which is expressed in the comment of this condition. Although it is a small step from a request to a command, it is nevertheless a very different action for the users regarding their relationship with the computer.

>

> _uacct = "UA-276221-6"; urchinTracker();