thesis speech act of request

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• Speech Acts

A request is a directive speech act whose illocutionary purpose is to get the hearer to do something in circumstances in which it is not obvious that he/she will perform the action in the normal course of events (Searle 1969). By initiating a request, the speaker believes that the hearer is able to perform an action.

The structure of a request may consist of two parts: the  head act  (the actual request) and  modifications  to the request (external or internal).

R equest strategies are divided into three types according to the level of inference (on the part of the hearer) needed to understand the utterance as a request. The three types of requests include:

• direct requests
• conventionally-indirect strategies (CI), and
• non-conventionally indirect (NCI) strategies (hints)

Direct and conventionally-indirect requests comprise a continuum of different strategies. A list of the strategies that comprise each request type (direct, CI, and NCI) is provided below, followed by examples for each strategy.

The perspective of requests can be emphasized, either projecting toward the speaker (Can I borrow your notes?) or the hearer (Can you loan me your notes?). Since we must take into account many factors when we make requests (for example, the age, social distance, gender, and level of imposition), speakers often employ different strategies (linguistic and non-linguistic) to minimize the effects of our request on the other person. Examples of head acts and modifications, as well as interactional data among Mexican Spanish speakers, are presented below.

Requests across languages

In their Cross-Cultural Realization Project (CCSARP), Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989) described various request strategies they observed among speakers from seven different countries (USA, Australia, England, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Israel).

Other researchers have focused on the realization patterns of requests in various languages. Some of these include: British English (Márquez Reiter 2000), French (Warga 2004), German (Shauer 2006; Warga 2004), Greek and British English (Sifianou 1992), Indonesian (Hassall 2003), Irish English (Barron 2003, 2006), and Polish (Wierbzicka, 2003), among others.

With regard to Spanish, requests have been examined in various regions of the Spanish-speaking world. These include: Colombian Spanish (Delgado 1994; Escamilla et al. 2004; Méndez-Vallejo 2006), Cuban Spanish (Ruiková 1998), Ecuadorian and Peninsular Spanish (Placencia 1998), Mexican Spanish (Félix-Brasdefer 2005), Uruguayan and Peninsular Spanish (Márquez Reiter 2000, 2002), and Venezuelan Spanish (García 1989).

Request-Response Interactions

Request-response interaction: two costa rican classmates.

Dos estudiantes costarricenses: Luis pide los apuntes y Javier responde.

Pragmatics & Discourse at IU resources

• César Félix-Brasdefer, Ph.D. - [email protected]

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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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• –––, 1969. Speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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• –––, 1979. ‘Indirect speech acts,’ in his Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1983. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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• –––, 1986b. ‘Notes on conversation,’ in D.G. Ellis and W. A. Donohue (eds.), Contemporary Issues in Language and Discourse Processes , Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates 7–19.
• –––, 1989. ‘How performatives work,’ Linguistics and Philosophy , 12: 535–558.
• –––, 1992. ‘Conversation,’ in H. Parrett and J. Verschueren (eds.), (On) Searle on Conversation , New York: Benjamins, 7–30.
• –––, 1999. Mind, Language, and Society: Doing Philosophy in the Real World , London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
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• –––, 1973. ‘Presuppositions,’ Journal of Philosophical Logic , 2: 447–457.
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• –––, 1989. J. L. Austin , New York: Routledge.

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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Requests and refusals in English and Chinese

--> Li, Li (2008) Requests and refusals in English and Chinese. PhD thesis, University of Leeds.

In this thesis, I study the speech acts of request and refusal in Chinese and English. The aim of this study is to not only compare the results between Chinese and English in the realization patterns in the two speech acts, but also between my investigation results and those of the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP)' (Blum- Kulka et al. 1989). In addition, it is designed to research the extent to which these two speech acts threaten the participants' face in the two languages, and what part social variables such as relative power, social distance and some cultural factors play in the interactions. I performed not only a linguistic and pragmatic analysis of the data but also a sociocultural analysis. The main framework I follow for data analysis is a combination of theoretical models: Brown & Levinson's (1987) model of strategies and Spencer-Oatey's (2005) framework of goals for the role-play. For the analysis of the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) data, I used both CCSARP's (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989) framework of directness and Brown & Levinson's (1987) model and their framework of social variables of power and distance, except for the fake refusals. I have proposed the approach of liräng/giänräng/ciräng along with Spencer-Oatey's (2005) explanation for the fake refusal phenomenon. In the analysis of cultural influences, I draw on Kroeber and Kluckholn (1952) and Triandis' (1994) research. In classifying the request data, Lee-Wong's (2000) method of classification is used. In grouping the data of refusals, I have adopted Beebe et al. 's (1990) classification. In collecting data, the role-play method is employed, complemented by DCT investigation. In the role-play, Chinese and English subjects are divided into groups and the task for each group is to discuss when, where and how they can make a trip together during a few days holiday. In the course of the discussion, there occur requests and disagreements (classified as `refusals' in my research), and in the DCTs, subjects are asked to choose from a set of fixed responses, or suggest an alternative of their own. The purpose is to see what differences or similarities there are between Chinese and English in the realization patterns of the two speech acts in various situations. The results show that, in the role-play, both Chinese and English favour the direct strategy in interaction. The frequency of the direct strategy (in requests) is much higher than that of other research such as that conducted by Zhang (1995), where participants prefer conventionally indirect strategies. However, the results of the DCTs demonstrate a less significant difference between my investigation and the CCSARP languages. The greatest difference between Chinese and English data lies in the fake refusals. Data analysis also indicates that factors (power, distance and even culture) do not have a large effect on the role-play results though they do influence the choice of strategies in the DCTs. The speech acts of requests and refusals are found to be multifunctional. In the role-play, for example, they often play a more supportive and constructive than a face-threatening role, as Brown & Levinson have claimed. In the DCT data, fake refusals are employed to show good manners. Conceptually, I have challenged those researchers who claim that Chinese face is different from English face, and who divide Chinese face into two different aspects: Tian and miänzi. Wang (1993: 566) says that "the modern man has only one liän [face]" and mianzi is only one of the synonyms of lin. Therefore, the Chinese have one face, just as the English do. The conceptualization of Chinese face having two aspects does not seem to be valid. This finding coincides with Leech's (2005: 27) that "despite differences, there is no East-West divide in politeness".

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The speech act of request: a comparative study between korean esl speakers and americans.

Soong-Hee Koh

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Document type, degree name.

Master of Arts in English Composition

This is a comparative study of Korean students' request forms and aspects of their culture that has not been recognized in the field of speech. This offers an explanation for miscommunication between Korean speakers of English and native speakers of English. Lastly, this study provides empirical information about how Korean students use request forms and how Koreans' politeness strategies differ from Americans'.

Recommended Citation

Koh, Soong-Hee, "The speech act of request: A comparative study between Korean ESL speakers and Americans" (2002). Theses Digitization Project . 2272. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2272

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Administrative state and the Bill of Rights

The administrative state continues to run amok under President Joe Biden.

Recently, a judge with the National Labor Relations Board found that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy violated federal labor law. His crime? Offering his opinion about the consequences of employees forming a union.

Jassy in April 2022 had the gall to tell a CNBC host that Amazon employees would be “better off” without a union because it would be harder to “get things done” and they would be less “empowered.” Two months later at a conference where he was interviewed by a Bloomberg TV anchor, Jassy made similar comments, as he did in November of that year to a New York Times forum.

This resulted in a complaint from union interests, who essentially argued that there is a First Amendment exception for speech made regarding union organizing efforts.

That notion is absurd, of course. Any regulations in the National Labor Relations Act governing union organization campaigns must be interpreted through the lens of the Bill of Rights.

Incredibly, however, Judge Brian D. Gee sided with Big Labor, ruling that Jassy had engaged in “coercive predictions about the effects of unionization” and made “threatening” comments that were not protected by the First Amendment. He then ordered Jassy to “cease and desist” from similar statements and mandated that the company post notices at various facilities that included the sentence: “WE WILL NOT threaten you by saying that you would be less empowered if you unionized, that you would find it harder to get things done quickly since unions are slower and more bureaucratic, and that you would be better off without a union.”

Not only did Judge Gee trample upon Jassy’s free-speech rights, a good case can be made that he went over the line again by compelling Amazon to support a viewpoint directly at odds with its leader’s original assertions.

It’s worth noting that Judge Gee is an administrative law judge for the NLRB. Before his appointment two years ago, he spent 26 years as an attorney for the board. This is the cozy arrangement that characterizes the administrative state on steroids. In-house judges who have a loyalty to the agency they represent and who are employed by the same bureaucracy that prosecutes the alleged violations they hear.

Yes, workers have a right to unionize. But neither labor interests nor management gives up its First Amendment rights during an organization effort.

“If Judge Gee’s decision is left to stand … employers would rightly wonder whether they can speak about unionization at all, despite their legally protected right to do so,” said a statement from the National Retail Federation.

Jassy should appeal immediately.

This editorial first appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. This commentary should be considered another point of view and not necessarily the opinion or editorial policy of The Dominion Post.

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Campus Protests At Commencements, Protesters Deliver Messages in Many Ways

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Here’s the latest on campus protests.

Graduates across the country showed their opposition to the war in Gaza this weekend, walking out of commencement speeches, draping themselves in Palestinian flags and chanting their demands to divest from Israel.

By and large, the ceremonies carried on. At Duke University Jerry Seinfeld, the famed comedian who has lately taken a public stance in support of Jews in the United States and Israel, received an honorary degree and advised hundreds of graduates to maintain a sense of humor, while a few dozen protesters walked out in their caps and gowns to have their own ceremony.

At Emerson College in Boston, where more than 100 protesters were arrested less than three weeks ago, some students used their walks across the stage as moments of individual protest, removing their gowns or displaying signs, sometimes to cheers and often to loud boos from the families watching from the stands.

At the University of Minnesota, several students receiving diplomas unfurled banners with pro-Palestinian messages like “Students for Palestine” and “Let Gaza Live.”

The graduations capped a tumultuous few weeks on college campuses as students mounted pro-Palestinian protests and encampments and, in many places, the police removed them. College administrators prepared for potential disruptions with increased security, strict ticketing systems, designated free speech zones and even requests that students open their gowns for inspection.

Pomona College, where pro-Palestinian students have announced a protest targeting the ceremony, moved the location of its commencement after demonstrators set up an encampment on the stage where the event was supposed to be held.

A few universities came to agreements with protesters or bowed to student demands and canceled commencement speeches .

Here are other developments:

Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore said on Sunday that it reached an agreement with student protesters to end their encampment and not restart it, promising to end some of the proceedings on student conduct involving the encampment and to review calls for divestment from Israel.

Arizona State University has banned a postdoctoral research scholar from campus as it investigates a video that showed him confronting a woman wearing a hijab at a pro-Israel rally near the school’s Tempe campus . The university, where the campus police recently broke up a pro-Palestinian encampment and arrested dozens of people, has also put the chief of its campus police department on leave.

Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans last week became the second school to rescind a commencement speaking invitation to Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The University of Vermont said earlier this month that she would not be speaking there, a concession to a demand from student demonstrators.

More than 2,800 people have been arrested at pro-Palestinian protests on U.S. campuses since April 18, according to New York Times tracking data .

— Shaila Dewan ,  Eduardo Medina and Maya Shwayder

A skirmish breaks out near Pomona College’s graduation.

Scuffle breaks out during pomona college commencement, pro-palestinian demonstrators tried to block access to pomona college’s graduation ceremony on sunday..

[chanting in call and response] Not another nickel, not another dime. No more money for Israel’s crime. Resistance is justified when people are occupied.

At least one person was arrested after scuffles broke out among pro-Palestinian protesters, private security officers and police officers outside Pomona College’s commencement in Los Angeles on Sunday evening, the latest confrontation between the school and a protest movement that has received strong support from students and faculty on campus.

The skirmish occurred outside the Shrine Auditorium, in downtown Los Angeles, where school administrators had made a last-minute decision to relocate the event. Since last week, protesters had been camping out on the school’s graduation stage at its campus in Claremont about 40 miles away.

As graduates and their families lined up outside the auditorium, more than a hundred protesters converged on the group, unfurling banners that read “Pomona College divest from genocide now,” and chanting “Shame!”

Minor fights broke out after demonstrators attempted to block some family members of the graduates from entering the venue. Los Angeles Police Department officers in riot gear moved in to disperse the crowd. No injuries were reported, and the commencement went on as scheduled.

Hours before the event on Sunday, as the university was preparing to bus students to the new graduation site, protesters took down their encampment on campus and declared victory in a statement, saying they had accomplished their goal of disrupting commencement.

The protesters at Pomona College, a private liberal arts college, began camping on campus in late March near a pro-Palestinian art project that was erected near a student services building. The project was dismantled by the college in early April, and protesters responded by storming and occupying the president’s office, leading to 20 arrests .

At the time, protesters voluntarily removed their encampment, but students returned last week, erecting tents on the stage that had been set up for graduation. Many students and faculty members believe the school has been hesitant to clear the new encampment because of criticism by some over the arrests last month. The school did not respond to a request for an interview.

Protesters at Pomona College have called on the school to disclose its investments in weapons manufacturers that work with Israel and negotiate on divestment. In February, the student government voted in favor of an academic boycott of Israel — the severing of relations with the country’s academic and cultural institutions — and approved a resolution calling on the college to disclose its ties to companies connected to the Israeli military campaign in Gaza.

Pomona College is one of five undergraduate colleges and two graduate institutions that make up the Claremont Colleges . At Pitzer College, another Claremont College, an encampment was disbanded by protesters after the president agreed on May 3 to disclose “its holdings in military and weapons manufacturers.”

The success at Pitzer has galvanized protesters at Pomona, who say that the college has so far not engaged with their demands.

For Lucía Driessen, 23, a student graduating with degrees in public policy analysis and biology, relocating the commencement to Los Angeles meant that her friends from other Claremont Colleges could not attend. And because a livestream of the ceremony was canceled, her parents could not watch from the East Coast.

“We’re used to graduation being a really big community thing on our campuses” she said. “And now it’s like we were ripped away from our community.”

— Jonathan Wolfe Reporting from Los Angeles

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University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and protesters reach a deal to end an encampment.

Protesters at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee will take down a pro-Palestinian encampment that had stood for two weeks under an agreement reached with the school, university officials said in a statement on Sunday. The encampment, believed to be the last one standing at a Wisconsin college, will be gone by Tuesday, they said.

School officials had allowed the encampment to stand and occupy a broad patch of lawn between Mitchell Hall and a busy thoroughfare on the campus’s southern boundary, choosing not to call in the police. That approach differed from one at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where administrators in early May called in the police to break down the tents after negotiations failed. After the initial crackdown failed to end the encampment, Wisconsin-Madison later came to an agreement with protesters to break down the camp voluntarily before commencement ceremonies over the weekend.

Mark Mone, the chancellor of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said in a statement last Wednesday that the university had exercised “the widest possible amount of patience and restraint.” But he also indicated that patience had nearly run out, and warned that the school might take action.

Under the agreement with the group of protesters, known as the UWM Popular University for Palestine Coalition, the university pledged to join calls for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas; denounce the destruction by Israeli forces of schools and universities in Gaza; and meet with protest leaders over their concerns about university investments.

The university also agreed to encourage the Water Council, a Milwaukee consortium of water technology companies, to cut ties with two Israeli government-owned entities, Mekorot and the Israel Innovation Authority. Mr. Mone is the treasurer of the Water Council’s board of directors.

In exchange, protesters agreed to take down the encampment, starting on Sunday and finishing by Tuesday, and to refrain from disrupting the university’s commencement ceremonies on Sunday.

In a statement, the protesters acknowledged the agreement.

“After hard fought edits and careful consideration by the coalition, we determined we had obtained all possible benefits from the encampment,” they said.

— Dan Simmons Reporting from Milwaukee

As Jerry Seinfeld receives an honorary degree at Duke, students walk out in protest.

Dozens of students walk out of duke commencement ceremony, as the comedian jerry seinfeld received an honorary degree at duke university’s commencement, dozens of students walked out and chanted, “free palestine.” some also chanted mr. seinfeld’s name during the walkout..

From stage: “Big deal about our commencement speaker?” [crowd boos and cheers] Some in crowd: “Free Palestine!” Some in crowd: “Free Palestine!” Some in crowd: “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!” From stage: “Thank you.”

Jerry Seinfeld knows his way around handling awkward moments onstage. Even so, the initial reception he faced at Duke University’s commencement on Sunday reflected a more complicated audience than usual.

As Mr. Seinfeld, who has recently been vocal about his support for Israel, received an honorary degree, dozens of students walked out and chanted, “Free, free Palestine,” while the comedian looked on and smiled tensely.

Many in the crowd jeered the protesters. Minutes later, as the last of the protesters were filing out, he approached the mic. His first words were: “Thank you. Oh my God, what a beautiful day.”

In his commencement speech, Mr. Seinfeld was mostly cautious, opting for a tight comedic script interspersed with life advice instead of a full-on response to the protests against his presence.

Still, in one part of his speech, he defended various types of privilege and appeared to hint at the elephant in the room.

“I grew up a Jewish boy from New York,” he said to applause from the crowd. “That is a privilege if you want to be a comedian.”

Outside Duke’s stadium, graduates walked around campus, chanting: “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest.” When they arrived at a green space, they were joined by hundreds of other people — including faculty, relatives and other protesters — who organized a makeshift graduation for them.

As they prepared to throw their caps in the air, Mr. Seinfeld continued his speech inside Wallace Wade Stadium, telling students that while he admired their generation’s commitment to inclusivity and not hurting other people’s feelings, “it is worth the sacrifice of occasional discomfort to have some laughs.”

Mr. Seinfeld, who has two children who have attended Duke, has been uncharacteristically vocal about his support for Jews in Israel while doing press in recent weeks for his latest film, “Unfrosted,” which chronicles the invention of Pop-Tarts .

Typically an apolitical comedian who prefers punchy takes on ordinary observations, Mr. Seinfeld is now engaging in the type of celebrity activism that few associate with him, and that has drawn criticism and praise. Since the attacks of Oct. 7 in Israel, he has signed a letter in support of the country and posted an earnest message on social media about his devotion to it.

His wife, Jessica Seinfeld, a cookbook author, recently promoted on Instagram a counterprotest at the University of California, Los Angeles, that she said she had helped bankroll. (She condemned the violence that occurred at a later counterprotest.)

In December, Mr. Seinfeld traveled to Tel Aviv to meet with the families of hostages, soberly recounting afterward the missile attack that occurred during the trip.

Still, his comments on the issues have been somewhat modest.

“I don’t preach about it,” he told GQ last month. “I have my personal feelings about it that I discuss privately. It’s not part of what I can do comedically, but my feelings are very strong.”

On Sunday, Mr. Seinfeld played to the crowd, telling students: “You’re never going to believe this: Harvard used to be a great place to go to school. Now it’s Duke.”

Not everyone at Duke, however, was laughing at Mr. Seinfeld’s jokes.

The Rev. Dr. Stefan Weathers Sr., an ordained minister in the American Baptist Church who was awarded a Ph.D. in divinity, had written a letter before the ceremony to the university asking that the comedian be replaced, citing Mr. Seinfeld’s ongoing and strong support for Israel.

Shreya Joshi, a graduate and one of the organizers of the protest, said that after Duke selected Mr. Seinfeld as the speaker, she and other seniors, faculty members and pro-Palestinian supporters began organizing the walkout and an alternate graduation.

Ms. Joshi, 21, who studied history at Duke and will be attending law school at the University of Chicago, said that it was painful to have lost out on a high school graduation ceremony in 2020 because of the pandemic, and the seniors still wanted one this year, even if it meant creating one outside of the university’s official channels.

And that pain, she added, paled in comparison to what people in Gaza are experiencing.

“The fact that we were going to sit here and celebrate our own?” Ms. Joshi said. “It felt trivial in the face of all that. Have you seen the tiny violin? That’s how it felt.”

Ms. Joshi said that they had tried to leave the main commencement ceremony in the least disruptive way possible. They chose to leave as the honorary degree was being given to Mr. Seinfeld because “none of us particularly wanted to listen to Seinfeld.”

— Eduardo Medina and Emily Cataneo Reporting from Duke University’s campus in Durham N.C.

At Emerson College’s commencement, there were expressions of protest from beginning to end.

At Emerson College’s commencement, pro-Palestinian supporters made sure they were seen and heard throughout the ceremony.

The graduation for the Boston school, held at Agganis Arena, took place less than three weeks after police officers stormed an encampment and arrested more than 100 protesters.

As the more than 1,000 students entered in a procession, about one in every five students had a fist raised or some kind of pro-Palestinian paraphernalia accompanying their cap and gown: a keffiyeh, a decorated mortarboard with a Palestinian flag, and, in one case, a Palestinian flag worn as a cape.

Almost immediately after the journalism professor Michael Brown began to speak to start the ceremony, several students began shouting pro-Palestinian slogans, which were met with loud boos from the crowd of families in the stands.

Brown pressed on forcefully. “I’m here for the graduates of 2024,” he proclaimed loudly over the din, drawing cheers from the crowd. “You are the class that didn’t have a high school graduation, so you’re going to have a graduation today!”

That set the tone for the rest of the ceremony. Several speeches that followed were interrupted. And the processions across the stage were filled with individual protests from students. Some removed their robes onstage in protest. Some held up signs.

One woman arrived onstage with no robe on, wearing all white covered in red writing about the war in Gaza . She threw her diploma across the stage and held up her hands, covered in red paint, before exiting. Another draped a flag over the main podium at the center of the stage, which was promptly removed.

The biggest cheers were for the student class president, Joe Nalieth. “Our message cannot be washed away with the chalk,” he said in his speech. “Our voices echo on campuses across the world, especially those campuses which have been reduced to rubble. Let us not forget, we are creatives, innovators and revolutionaries.”

After the ceremony wrapped up just after 1 p.m., around 50 students defected from the recessional to stay on the floor on the arena, trying to shout “Free Palestine!” over the drum corps playing the graduates out.

— Maya Shwayder Reporting from Boston

Student protesters at Johns Hopkins agree to end encampment.

Johns Hopkins University said on Sunday that it reached an agreement with student protesters to end their encampment and not restart it, the university said in a statement . The school said it promised students a “timely review” of their calls for divestment from Israel.

The university also said it was ending proceedings on some student conduct from the encampment as long as protesters do not disrupt more university functions, including the commencement ceremony on May 23. But those proceedings will continue for allegations of misconduct including violence, assault or property damage.

“We are grateful to the many members of our community — faculty, staff, and students — who helped us navigate this moment,” Ron Daniels, the university president, said. “This is a truly difficult time in our world and at our university, with the anguish of the ongoing conflict and human tragedy in Israel and Gaza.”

Students began an encampment on April 29, which the university said violated policies that were designed to safeguard freedom of expression and safety on campus.

The group behind the encampment, the Hopkins Justice Collective, confirmed the agreement.

“In no way are we satisfied with this end to our demonstration,” the group said in a statement, saying that it was only a first step. “Palestinian liberation remains in our sights.”

— Colbi Edmonds

A closer look at the violent attack at U.C.L.A. raises questions about the police response.

Nearly two weeks after a pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles, was attacked by counterprotesters, university officials still have not explained why security officers stood by for hours while the attack was underway, nor have the authorities arrested any of those who swarmed in wielding metal rods, water bottles and firecrackers in one of the worst outbreaks of violence in the college protests that have rocked the country.

The extent of the policing failure has become clearer in recent days, as witnesses have come forward to describe a chaotic night of violence on April 30, in which students and bystanders repeatedly called 911 and nonemergency lines, finding little help and calls that were disconnected. A dispatcher told one caller pleading for help that they were ending the call because “I have actual emergencies to handle.”

One man was filmed by a local television station on the phone with emergency dispatchers, alerting them that people were getting hurt. “Security has abandoned this encampment,” he could be heard saying before lowering his phone and looking at it. “They just hung up on me again,” he said incredulously.

Miles away in Sacramento, staff members in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office contacted the U.C.L.A. chancellor’s office shortly after 11 p.m. to make sure that law enforcement officers were responding to the scene, and were assured that more officers were coming, according to a person familiar with the situation, who described the discussions on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to make them public.

But as the night wore on and there was still no intervention, the person said, the governor’s office moved to circumvent local authority and ordered California Highway Patrol officers to the campus. The state officers began assembling on campus at 1:45 a.m., a few moments before L.A.P.D. riot police arrived, but it took another hour to quell the clashes.

The chancellor’s office, the L.A.P.D. and an outside consultant hired to investigate the tardy response have all declined to discuss it, pending the outcome of an inquiry that could take weeks or months. The campus police chief, John Thomas, also did not comment. He told The Los Angeles Times that he had relied on private security officers who were not authorized to make arrests, but that he had done “everything I could” to keep students safe.

To understand what happened, New York Times journalists conducted interviews with several people who were at the protests that night, including two people who were involved in the counterprotest; reviewed and analyzed video footage ; and spoke with organizations involved in both the pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli movements on campus.

The review found no public callouts for such a violent attack and no clear signs that one group coordinated the attack, though some people had arrived wearing black clothes and masks and seemingly prepared for violence. There was also no indication that the police had prepared for the kind of severe assault on the encampment that took place.

Instead, it appeared that contract security officers who did not have sufficient authority or numbers to halt the escalating melee had been caught by surprise and left to wait for reinforcements that did not arrive for hours.

“Either the university was hesitant to do anything to get law enforcement involved, or law enforcement was dealing with authorization issues and political considerations from elected officials,” said Ed Davis, a former Boston police commissioner who is familiar with crowd control policing issues. “And then things got out of hand.”

Despite growing concern on campus about the pro-Palestinian encampment, complaints about antisemitic incidents and the potential for violence, in the early days of the protests, university officials made it clear that they would consider calling in outside police only as a last resort.

“We are following University of California systemwide policy guidance, which directs us not to request law enforcement involvement preemptively, and only if absolutely necessary to protect the physical safety of our campus community,” Mary Osako, the vice chancellor for strategic communications, said in a statement on April 26 , shortly after the encampment had been set up.

On the night of April 30, a range of counterprotesters had gathered, a group that grew in size as expectations mounted that the police would begin dismantling the encampment. In interviews, witnesses said there had been little warning before counterprotesters went on the offensive.

One of the counterprotesters, Liel Asherian, was seen on video footage kicking at the encampment’s plywood barrier, pulling boards to the ground and slamming a tennis racket against the wood that remained. He said he had gone that night to see the encampment on his own, though he later acknowledged that a friend of his was also pictured at the scene. In an interview, he said he was not part of any group and had not intended to participate in a conflict.

Mr. Asherian said he had approached the pro-Palestinian encampment to ask some people why they were protesting. He said he believed Jewish people such as himself and Palestinians were like cousins, and he expressed alarm at the innocent Palestinians being killed in Israel’s military campaign. But he said he disliked the disruptive tactics the pro-Palestinian protesters were using at U.C.L.A.

He said things devolved when someone called him a “dirty Jew” and he was doused in pepper spray.

“That made me start breaking down their barricades,” he said.

Also among the counterprotesters that night was Narek Palyan, an activist known for making frequent antisemitic statements, as well as comments critical of gay and transgender people. He said he went alone and was motivated to show up in part because he had seen a video of a Jewish woman on the pro-Palestinian side criticizing white people.

“I wanted to go find her, specifically,” he said, adding that he was not able to.

Mr. Palyan said he did not necessarily support either side in the protest or the war.

He said he spent much of the night asking people questions about their positions and trying to keep people from fighting by throwing makeshift weapons into nearby bushes. Mr. Palyan, who is Armenian American, also said he had warned two younger Armenian boys to stay out of the melee.

“I told them, ‘This isn’t ours,’” he said.

Anthony Cabassa, a self-described conservative independent journalist who posted videos of the chaos, said many people may have flocked to the scene on Tuesday night in the hours after U.C.L.A. declared the encampment illegal, believing that the police would move in to clear it and make arrests.

But then the counterprotesters descended on the protest, pulling metal gates away from the group and attacking protesters.

“We were all waiting for the L.A.P.D. to show up, and they never did,” Mr. Cabassa said in an interview. “As the night went on, more and more pro-Israel folks started showing up, to the point where it was starting to get worrisome.”

He said some people seemed to have arrived after seeing broadcasts of the tense scene that he and other livestreamers made, wanting to witness what would happen next.

“People were responding to my livestream and saying ‘I just showed up because of you. I live nearby,’” he said. But others, he said, appeared to have planned for potential clashes, wearing all-black outfits and ski masks. Mr. Cabassa recalled being concerned about their presence.

In the end, more than 30 protesters were injured, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations Los Angeles, before police dispersed the crowd.

Brian H. Levin, the founding director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, said that, with religion and ethnicity at the heart of the recent protests, the attack had amounted to a hate crime.

“This comes at a time when major U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, have had a surge in anti-Arab and Muslim hate crimes and have hit a record for anti-Jewish crimes,” he said.

Mr. Levin watched the incident via livestream and said the weapons, the presence of some of the same people from previous protests and the waving of a yellow flag associated with Chabad-Lubavitch, a Hasidic Jewish movement, suggested some organizational coordination among the counterprotesters.

The director of the nearby Chabad House said the group had no role in the protest that night.

But he also noted that some of the implements wielded by the counterprotesters “were spontaneous weapons of opportunity,” and that some people “may have just showed up randomly with their own separate xenophobic and religious bigotries.”

The next day, after the counterprotesters had left, police officers moved in to remove the pro-Palestinian encampment, making more than 200 arrests.

Marie Salem, a U.C.L.A. graduate student and one of the protesters, questioned why the police had arrested dozens of student protesters but had not yet arrested any of those who had attacked them.

“The majority of the encampment is students that attend this university, and who were not violent,” Ms. Salem said. “We were met with violence, and the other side looked like majority not-students, which the university chose to protect over their own students.”

Jonathan Wolfe and Shawn Hubler contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

— Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs ,  Mike Baker and Serge F. Kovaleski Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reported from Los Angeles, Mike Baker from Seattle and Serge F. Kovaleski from New York.

Frustrated by Gaza Coverage, Student Protesters Turn to Al Jazeera

Nick Wilson has closely followed news on the war in Gaza since October. But Mr. Wilson, a Cornell student, is picky when it comes to his media diet: As a pro-Palestinian activist, he doesn’t trust major American outlets’ reporting on Israel’s campaign in Gaza.

Instead, he turns to publications less familiar to some American audiences, like the Arab news network Al Jazeera.

“Al Jazeera is the site that I go to to get an account of events that I think will be reliable,” he said.

Many student protesters said in recent interviews that they were seeking on-the-ground coverage of the war in Gaza, and often, a staunchly pro-Palestinian perspective — and they are turning to alternative media for it. There’s a range of options: Jewish Currents , The Intercept, Mondoweiss and even independent Palestinian journalists on social media, as they seek information about what is happening in Gaza.

Their preferences embody a broader shift for members of Generation Z, who are increasingly seeking out news from a wider array of sources and questioning legacy outlets in a fragmented media ecosystem.

Israel’s recent ban on the local operations of Al Jazeera has only elevated the network’s status among many student protesters. They prize coverage from reporters on the ground, and Al Jazeera has a more extensive operation in Gaza than any other publication. Students also noted the sacrifices it has made to tell the story there. Two Al Jazeera journalists have died since the start of the war.

“Al Jazeera is sort of playing that role for a lot of younger Americans, in terms of getting a different perspective than they feel like they’re getting from U.S. media,” said Ben Toff, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota.

While many Western media outlets, with few if any journalists in Gaza before the war, have struggled to gain access to the territory, Al Jazeera has been recognized for its raw, searing portrayals of the death and destruction there. A typical report may show video of Israeli tanks rolling into cities, alongside drone shots of leveled buildings in Gaza City and Palestinians fleeing their homes.

“It’s news about the Middle East, and it doesn’t really convey it in a Western perspective , ” said Alina Atiq, a student at the University of South Florida who has pushed her university to divest from Israel.

The network, owned by Qatar, has its headquarters in Doha and operates two separate newsrooms that provide English- and Arabic-language content. Its mobile apps have been downloaded in the United States 295,000 times since October, an increase of more than 200 percent from the previous seven months, according to Appfigures, a market research firm.

Among the outlets frequently cited by protesters, Al Jazeera English is by far the most popular on social media. It has 1.9 million followers on TikTok — up from around 750,000 at the outset of the war — and 4.6 million on Instagram.

Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, described the network’s Arabic-language channel as more outwardly pro-Palestinian than the English one, which he said has a more subtle slant.

Critics say its coverage veers into support of the armed resistance to Israel. The Israeli government, which has accused Al Jazeera of acting as a “mouthpiece” for Hamas, last Sunday seized its broadcast equipment and shut down its operations in the country for at least 45 days.

Al Jazeera called the government’s accusation “baseless” in a statement, adding that it has broadcast every news conference held by the Israeli cabinet and representatives for the Israel Defense Forces, in addition to videos from Hamas.

It also said that its reporting “provides diverse viewpoints and narrative and counter narrative,” and that charges of pro-Palestinian bias should be “scrutinized through careful analysis of our journalistic standards and reporting practices.”

The Israeli government’s rejection of Al Jazeera appears to have bolstered the network’s reputation among some of the students.

“It goes to show the extent to which Israel is afraid of the coverage and reportage of Al Jazeera,” said Matthew Vickers, a junior at Occidental College in Los Angeles who has been active in efforts to persuade his school to divest from companies tied to Israel.

The protesters rattle off a list of mainstream American publications as having coverage they find objectionable, including CNN, The Atlantic and The New York Times, among many others. Though major news outlets have reported extensively on Israel’s campaign in Gaza, the death toll and the damage, the coverage in the view of student protesters doesn’t assign enough blame to Israel for Palestinian deaths, or thoroughly fact-check Israeli officials. And they said protest coverage has focused too much on antisemitism on college campuses instead of Islamophobia.

“There’s a fair amount of misinformation that is being fed to us by mainstream media, and just a clear bias when it comes to the Palestine issue,” said Cameron Jones, a student at Columbia University and an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace, a pro-Palestinian organization.

The activists’ interest in Al Jazeera stands in contrast with the outlet’s previous struggles to find an audience in the United States. The network started an American channel in 2013, but that folded in 2016 with nightly ratings that hovered around 30,000, far shy of viewership for cable networks like Fox News and CNN.

Part of what doomed the network back then was “a distinctly anti-American bent” to its coverage, Mr. Ibish wrote in a 2016 guest essay for The Times. But now, broadcast from a different country, the network’s tone is finding its audience on university campuses, he said.

“There’s a third-worldist, anti-imperial point of view, and that’s also the view that many college kids have adopted,” he said.

Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting.

— Santul Nerkar

On a day with many calm ceremonies, Berkeley’s protests stand out.

At the University of California, Berkeley, hundreds of soon-to-be graduates rose from their seats in protest, chanting and disrupting their commencement. At Virginia Commonwealth University, about 60 graduates in caps and gowns walked out during Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s speech. At the University of Wisconsin, a handful of graduates stood with their backs to their chancellor as she spoke.

After weeks of tumult on college campuses over pro-Palestinian protests, many administrators prepared themselves for disruptions at graduations on Saturday. And while there were demonstrations — most noisily, perhaps, at U.C. Berkeley — ceremonies at several universities unfolded without major incident. Many students who protested did so silently.

Anticipating possible disruptions, university administrators had increased their security or taken various measures, including dismantling encampments, setting aside free speech zones, canceling student speeches and issuing admission tickets.

Some administrators also tried to reach agreements with encampment organizers. The University of Wisconsin said it had reached a deal with protesters to clear the encampment in return for a meeting to discuss the university’s investments.

Some students, too, were on edge about their big day — many missed their high school graduations four years ago because of the pandemic and did not want to repeat the experience.

In 2020, David Emuze and his mother had watched his high school graduation “ceremony,” a parade of senior photos set to music on Zoom, from their living room in Springfield, Ill. This time, he and his classmates at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign heard that other schools, like the University of Southern California and Columbia University, had canceled their main-stage commencements altogether because of campus unrest.

But on Saturday morning, Mr. Emuze donned his electric-blue mortarboard and orange sash, and his mother watched live from the audience as he received his bachelor’s degree in public health. “It was a touching, peaceful, inspiring and motivational ceremony,” he said, with a note of relief in his voice.

He said the keynote speaker, Jeanne Gang, an architect and University of Illinois alumna, had hit just the right note. She acknowledged that “we all know about what’s going on in the world right now,” but said it was a time to come together and celebrate achievements.

At Berkeley, the home of the free-speech movement, the protesters made themselves heard. Greta Brown, 23, an environmental science graduate, wore cap, gown and a stole with the word “Palestine” emblazoned on it. She was among those who stood and chanted during the graduation speeches. “I felt like it was necessary,” she said, because the university had not done enough. “I just heard a lot of, like, ‘Oh, we hear you,’ and a centrist point of view.”

At the beginning of the ceremony, Chancellor Carol Christ was met with boos when she began to speak, but there were louder cheers when she mentioned the pro-Palestinian encampment nearby. “Students have been camping around Sproul Hall for almost three weeks,” Dr. Christ said. “They feel passionately about the brutality of the violence in Gaza.” She added, “I, too, am deeply troubled by the terrible tragedy.”

As the speeches continued, the disruptions escalated. Dozens of students in the crowd in the stands rose with signs reading “Divest,” and at least 10 Palestinian flags. They began to chant, and then interrupted the speech by the student body president, Sydney Roberts, who said, “This wouldn’t be Berkeley without a protest.”

Despite warnings from a school official, a group of students staked out a section of empty stadium seats behind the main stage, chanting, “Hey hey, ho ho, the occupation has got to go” and “UC divest” and attracting other students until the crowd swelled to about 500. Most of them slowly made their way to the exit as the graduation drew to a close.

Not all of the protests were centered on the Middle East. At Virginia Commonwealth in Richmond, Micah White, 26, was one of roughly 60 students who walked out while the governor was speaking.

“The first thing that motivated me is the hypocrisy of V.C.U. declaring themselves to be a minority-serving institution, declaring themselves to be for diversity, equity and inclusion, and bringing Youngkin in as commencement speaker,” he said.

The university’s board voted on Friday against requiring students to take racial literacy classes . Mr. Youngkin, a Republican, requested to review course materials for proposed racial literacy classes.

Mr. Youngkin also supported the dismantling of an encampment on campus late last month during which 13 people, including six students, were arrested. Sereen Haddad, 19, who studies psychology at V.C.U., said she was knocked to the ground during the clash between protesters and the police that day and that Mr. Youngkin had failed to acknowledge that the encampment was peaceful.

The ceremonies came after a week in which some colleges made arrests and cleared encampments of pro-Palestinian demonstrators. In recent days, authorities dismantled encampments at the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Officers were also called in to empty an encampment at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, deploying “chemical munitions” in the process, hours before its graduation ceremony on Friday evening.

Anger over the clearing of an encampment lingered for some at the University of North Carolina commencement on Saturday night. Many students jeered their interim chancellor, Lee Roberts, who last month ordered that an encampment of pro-Palestinian protesters be removed. Still, when two students waved Palestinian flags and walked on the field in the middle of Mr. Roberts’s speech before security escorted them out, the majority of the stadium booed them and chanted, “USA! USA!”

Cynthia Howle and Eduardo Medina contributed reporting.

An earlier version of this article misstated the given name of a female student at Virginia Commonwealth University and misidentified her gender. She is Sereen Haddad, not Sareen.

An earlier version of this article misstated the title of the person who warned a group of students against disrupting the ceremony. It was a school official but not a vice provost.

How we handle corrections

— Shaila Dewan ,  Holly Secon ,  Leah Small and Robert Chiarito

Arizona State bans a scholar from campus after a confrontation at a protest.

Arizona State University has banned a postdoctoral research scholar and faculty member from campus as it investigates a video that went viral depicting him confronting a woman in a hijab, the school said this week.

In the video from May 5, the scholar, Jonathan Yudelman, along with another unidentified man, can be seen cursing and getting in a woman’s face at a pro-Israel rally near the school’s Tempe campus .

It was unclear what occurred before the video, but at one point in the video Mr. Yudelman can be seen repeatedly advancing toward the woman who is wearing a hijab, and telling her — “I’m literally in your face, that’s right” — as she backs away from him.

The woman responds and tells him that he is disrespecting her religious boundaries to which Mr. Yudelman responds, “You disrespect my sense of humanity,” followed by a profanity.

Mr. Yudelman, who was a postdoctoral fellow at the university’s School of Civics, Ethics and Leadership , had earlier resigned from the position, effective June 30, according to a statement the school released on Wednesday. But the school said he was placed on leave on May 6, adding that he was no longer permitted to come to campus, teach classes or interact with students or employees.

“Arizona State University protects freedom of speech and expression but does not tolerate threatening or violent behavior. While peaceful protest is welcome, all incidents of violent or threatening behavior will be addressed,” the statement added.

Mr. Yudelman was interviewed on May 5 at the pro-Israel rally by Phoenix television station KPNX . In the clip , he stated that campuses across the country were being “taken over by supporters of terrorism,” and stated that Jewish students were being intimidated. “It was important to come out, show the broader community that there are people who stand against this,” he said.

Mr. Yudelman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

— Anna Betts

Pennsylvania’s governor leans into the campus fight over antisemitism.

A few hours after Columbia University canceled its main commencement ceremony following weeks of pro-Palestinian student protests, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania was in his office in Harrisburg, taking stock of the ways he sees universities letting students down.

“Our colleges, in many cases, are failing young people,” he said in an interview this week. “Failing to teach information that is necessary to form thoughtful perspectives. They are willing to let certain forms of hate pass by and condemn others more strongly.”

Mr. Shapiro — the leader of a pre-eminent battleground state, a rising Democrat and a proudly observant Jew — has also emerged as one of his party’s most visible figures denouncing the rise in documented antisemitism after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

And at a moment of growing Democratic anger and unease over how Israel is conducting its devastating military response, Mr. Shapiro, 50 — who has no obligation to talk about foreign policy — has not shied away from expressing support for the country while criticizing its right-wing government.

Plunging into a subject that has inflamed and divided many Americans carries risk for an ambitious Democrat from a politically important state. The politics around both the Gaza war and the protest movement are exceptionally fraught within the Democratic Party , and many of its voters and elected officials have become increasingly critical of Israel.

But Mr. Shapiro has been direct.

Asked if he considered himself a Zionist, he said that he did. When Iran attacked Israel last month, he wrote on social media that Pennsylvania “stands with Israel.”

When the University of Pennsylvania’s president struggled before Congress to directly answer whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated the school’s rules, Mr. Shapiro said she had failed to show “moral clarity.” ( She later resigned .) When opponents of the Gaza war picketed an Israeli-style restaurant in Philadelphia known for its falafel and tahini shakes, Mr. Shapiro called the demonstration antisemitic and showed up for lunch.

And as university officials have struggled to define where free speech ends and hate speech begins, a tension upending the final weeks of the school year, Mr. Shapiro has issued stern warnings about their responsibility to protect students from discrimination. The issue hits close to home: On Friday, police cleared an encampment of pro-Palestinian demonstrators off the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Shapiro had said it was “ past time ” for Penn to do so.

‘It should not be hard’

In the interview, Mr. Shapiro stressed that he did not believe all encampments or demonstrators were antisemitic — not “by any stretch.” But he suggested that on some campuses, antisemitic speech was treated differently than other kinds of hate speech.

“If you had a group of white supremacists camped out and yelling racial slurs every day, that would be met with a different response than antisemites camped out, yelling antisemitic tropes,” he said.

Law enforcement officials and advocacy groups have tracked a rise in antisemitic, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab acts in recent months.

Speaking after an appearance at a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony on Monday, Mr. Shapiro emphasized that “we should be universal in our condemnation of antisemitism, Islamophobia and all forms of hate.”

While there is room for “nuance” in foreign policy discussions, he said, “it should not be hard for anyone on the political left or right to call out antisemitism.”

In a new survey , Mr. Shapiro, a former state attorney general, had a job approval rating of 64 percent, with just 19 percent of Pennsylvanians saying they disapproved.

He has long emphasized bipartisanship and prioritized nonideological issues like rapidly reopening a stretch of Interstate 95 after a collapse. And his own religious observance has helped him connect with people of other faiths in a state where Jews are estimated to make up about 3 percent of the electorate.

“I make it home Friday night for Sabbath dinner because family and faith ground me,” he said in a campaign ad.

Many Jews in Pennsylvania hope that he will become the first Jewish president. On that subject, he deflects as skillfully as any potential White House aspirant: He laughs or insists that he loves and is focused on his current job.

“I am very humbled that people have taken note of our work,” he said. “I sort of dismiss those comments because they’re not helpful to the work I’m trying to do every day as governor, the voice I’m trying to have both here in the commonwealth and across the country to root out hate and to speak with moral clarity.”

He added, “It’s certainly not helpful when it comes to our top political priority, which is to re-elect President Biden.”

‘Josh is front and center’

The Mideast war, which has killed more than 34,000 people in Gaza, according to local health authorities, has fueled a broad and significant protest movement.

But on college campuses, there are sharp debates over when demonstrations against Israel and its treatment of Palestinians veer into antisemitic targeting of Jewish students and institutions.

To Mr. Shapiro, the distinction is clear: Criticism of Israeli policies is fair game. “Affixing to every Jew the policies of Israel,” he said, is not.

Mr. Shapiro said he felt a “unique responsibility” to speak out both because he leads a state founded on a vision of religious tolerance , and because he is a “proud American Jew.”

Indeed, his Jewish identity is intertwined with his public persona to a degree rarely seen in American politicians.

He is a Jewish day school alumnus who has featured challah in his campaign advertising and alludes to a collection of Jewish ethics in his speeches. In recent weeks, he offered an under-the-weather 76ers player matzo ball soup and celebrated the end of Passover with Martin’s Potato Rolls, a Pennsylvania delicacy.

“It’s not an easy time to be Jewish, and to be a Jewish politician,” said Sharon Levin, a former teacher of Mr. Shapiro’s. “Josh is front and center.”

Mr. Shapiro has also spent significant time in Israel, proposing to his wife in Jerusalem . Asked if, like Mr. Biden , he considers himself a Zionist, he confirmed that he did.

“I am pro-Israel,” he said. “I am pro-the idea of a Jewish homeland, a Jewish state, and I will certainly do everything in my power to ensure that Israel is strong and Israel is fortified and will exist for generations.”

He also supports a two-state solution , is a longtime critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and said he mourned “the loss of life in Gaza.”

That approach is common among elected Democrats. But it is clearly at odds with the campus protests, which are often explicitly anti-Zionist.

The issue is virtually certain to divide Democrats on future presidential debate stages.

For now, Mr. Shapiro has not drawn the kind of backlash from the left that some other Israel supporters have, in part because he is not voting on foreign policy. And while another Pennsylvania Democrat, Senator John Fetterman, has sometimes engaged provocatively with pro-Palestinian demonstrators, Mr. Shapiro has a more measured, lawyerly style.

“It’s critically important that we remove hate from the conversation and allow people to freely express their ideas, whether I agree with their ideas or not,” he said.

Tensions over Israel

Some Muslim leaders say Mr. Shapiro has not found the right balance in his post-Oct. 7 comments.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations in Philadelphia said in a statement that two of its board members had skipped an iftar dinner he hosted, arguing that he had “created much harm and hurt among Muslim, Arab and pro-Palestinian Pennsylvanians.”

“The governor, like the White House, is not fully able to see the deep level of resentment that exists about his stances,” Ahmet Tekelioglu, the executive director of that chapter, said in an interview. (In a statement on Friday, he also criticized Mr. Shapiro’s call to disband the Penn encampment.) “The governor has lost the trust of many in the Muslim-American community in Pennsylvania that had long considered him a friend.”

Mr. Shapiro, whose team has clashed with CAIR before, replied, “I’m not going to let one press release from one group that has its own agenda take away from the close, strong relationship I have with the Muslim community.”

“We have tried to create, at the residence and across Pennsylvania, a place where all faiths feel welcomed,” he said.

State Representative Tarik Khan, a Philadelphia-area Democrat who is Muslim, did attend the iftar. It included time for prayer and a “legit dinner,” he said, rather than “hors d’oeuvres and get the hell out.”

“At a time when there’s a lot of trauma, sometimes the easy thing is to do nothing,” Mr. Khan said. “If he didn’t care about our community, he wouldn’t have spent that time.”

Growing expectations

Mr. Shapiro faces different pressures from the Jewish community.

In the Philadelphia area, many know him or his family personally — or feel as if they do — and in some cases expect him to speak out frequently in support of Israel. But, said Jonathan Scott Goldman, the chair of the Pennsylvania Jewish Coalition, his job is to lead the whole state.

“Jewish people want to and do claim Josh as their own,” Mr. Goldman said. “He knows he’s not just a Jewish governor. He’s a governor, and he’s the governor of all Pennsylvanians.”

In the interview, Mr. Shapiro reiterated that he was focused on that job.

But asked if — broadly speaking — he believed the country could elect a Jewish president in his lifetime, he replied, “Speaking broadly, absolutely.”

“It doesn’t mean that our nation is free of bias,” he said. “If you’re asking me, can the country rise above that, and elect someone that might look different than them or worship different than them? The answer is yes.”

— Katie Glueck Reporting from Pennsylvania’s State Capitol building in Harrisburg, Pa.

Here’s why antiwar protests haven’t flared up at Black colleges like Morehouse.

As President Biden prepares to give graduation remarks this month at Morehouse College in Atlanta, a prestigious historically Black institution, the White House is signaling anxiety about the potential for protests over the war in Gaza.

During a recent visit to Atlanta, Vice President Kamala Harris stopped to ask the Morehouse student government president about the sentiment on campus about the conflict, how students felt about Mr. Biden’s visit and what the graduating class would like to hear from him on May 19.

Then, on Friday, the White House dispatched the leader of its public engagement office and one of its most senior Black officials, Stephen K. Benjamin, to the Morehouse campus for meetings to take the temperature of students, faculty members and administrators.

The reasons for concern are clear: Nationwide demonstrations over the war and Mr. Biden’s approach to it have inflamed more than 60 colleges and universities , stoked tensions within the Democratic Party and created new headaches for his re-election bid.

Yet Mr. Biden appears to be entering a different type of scene at Morehouse.

While anger over the war remains palpable at Morehouse and other historically Black colleges and universities, these campuses have been largely free of turmoil, and tensions are far less evident: no encampments, few loud protests and little sign of Palestinian flags flying from dorm windows.

The reasons stem from political, cultural and socioeconomic differences with other institutions of higher learning. While H.B.C.U.s host a range of political views, domestic concerns tend to outweigh foreign policy in the minds of most students. Many started lower on the economic ladder and are more intently focused on their education and their job prospects after graduation.

At Morehouse — which has a legacy of civil rights protests and is the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s alma mater — discontent over the Gaza war has played out in classrooms and auditoriums rather than on campus lawns.

“This should not be a place that cancels people regardless of if we agree with them,” David Thomas, the Morehouse president, said in an interview on Thursday. Of Mr. Biden’s visit, he said, “Whether people support the decision or not, they are committed to having it happen on our campus in a way that doesn’t undermine the integrity or dignity of the school.”

Some students have held contentious meetings with university leaders and urged them to rescind Mr. Biden’s invitation, and a small group of faculty members has vowed not to attend commencement. Some alumni wrote a letter expressing worries that student protesters could be punished, noting Morehouse’s history of “celebrating student activists long after they have graduated.”

But the college might appear politically safer for the president to visit than many others. Morehouse is a custom-bound place where undergraduates traditionally do not step on the grass in the heart of campus until they receive their degrees. Alumni view commencement as a distinguished event not only for students but also for scores of family and community members — making it a less likely venue for a major disruption.

Mr. Biden chose to speak at Morehouse after the White House had received invitations from an array of colleges. It will be the third time in four years he has addressed graduates of a historically Black institution; he has also spoken at commencement for one military academy each year.

Among those lobbying Mr. Biden to come to Morehouse was Cedric Richmond, a member of the college’s class of 1995, who ran Mr. Biden’s public engagement office and is now a senior adviser at the Democratic National Committee .

Mr. Richmond, who has a nephew at Morehouse, predicted Mr. Biden would speak about the high expectations of the college’s alumni, promote his record of reducing Black unemployment and narrowing the racial wealth gap, and deliver familiar exhortations about perseverance.

Mr. Richmond does not think Mr. Biden will face protests.

“The Morehouse College graduation, at least as I remember it, is a very solemn event,” he said. “You have almost 500 African American males walking across that stage, whose parents and grandparents sacrificed and those students worked their butts off to, one, get into Morehouse, and two, to graduate. That’s a very significant day. And I’m just not sure whether students or protesters are going to interfere with that solemn moment.”

Vice President Harris, who graduated from Howard University, another historically Black institution, is engaged in her own virtual tour of such colleges. A congratulatory video she recorded will be played for graduates at 44 H.B.C.U.s; she is often introduced as a surprise guest and greeted with cheers.

In Atlanta last month, Ms. Harris asked the Morehouse student government president, Mekhi Perrin, what approach Mr. Biden should take in his address.

“I think really she was just trying to gain an idea of what exactly students’ issues were with his coming, if any at all,” Mr. Perrin said. “And what would kind of shift that narrative.”

Mr. Biden has been trailed by Gaza protesters for months. The last time he spoke at a four-year college campus was in January, when demonstrators interrupted him at least 10 times during a rally at George Mason University in Virginia.

Morehouse’s traditions are strong. Dr. King said it was a place where he had advanced his understanding of nonviolent protest and moral leadership — which current Morehouse students say they take seriously.

“I feel like the protests do need to come out, because if you don’t see students advocating for what they believe in, then the change that they’re advocating for will never come about,” said Benjamin Bayliss, a Morehouse junior. Looking toward the statue of Dr. King in front of the chapel named for the civil rights leader, he added, “You really feel the weight of what King did and the fire of the torch that he lit that we have to carry on.”

Yet even as some students feel compelled to protest, outside factors can shape their decisions. Roughly 75 percent of students at H.B.C.U.s, including 50 percent of Morehouse students, are eligible for the Pell Grant , a federal aid program for low-income students. More than 80 percent of Morehouse students receive some form of financial aid. In the Class of 2024, nearly a third of graduates will be the first in their family to receive a bachelor’s degree.

Some students at Black colleges also may decide against protesting because of family pressure , which amplifies the importance of securing their degrees.

“Your student body at Columbia is very different than the student body at, say, Dillard,” said Walter Kimbrough, who spent a decade as president of Dillard University, a historically Black institution in New Orleans. “It doesn’t mean that people aren’t concerned. But they understand that they have some different kinds of stakes.”

The stakes are also high for Mr. Biden, whose standing with Black voters has softened ahead of November’s presidential election. Young people are less enthusiastic about voting at all — partly because of Mr. Biden’s handling of the Gaza war, but also because they are unhappy with the choice between him and former President Donald J. Trump.

“I think it’s really just picking the lesser of two evils,” said Freddrell Rhea Green II, a Morehouse freshman. “Anything better than Donald Trump, a madman, a quote unquote tyrant, is better for me.”

“Joe Biden is probably a very nice person,” said Samuel Livingston, an associate professor of Africana studies at Morehouse. “But niceness is not the level of leadership that we need. We need ethical leadership. And continuing to support the aiding, abetting and the stripping of Palestinian land, from Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, is not ethical.”

Some students, like Auzzy Byrdsell, a senior studying kinesiology and journalism, support their classmates’ protests but fear a possible response from the police to a crowd of largely Black young men.

“Do we get tear-gassed?” said Mr. Byrdsell, the editor in chief of The Maroon Tiger, the school’s student newspaper. “Do we get arrested? That would not be the greatest look for a Morehouse College graduation.”

Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, a 1991 Morehouse alumnus, said that he hoped Mr. Biden would highlight his record and his agenda — but that there was little the president could say about the Gaza conflict to assuage his critics on campus.

“While what he says is important,” Mr. Warnock said, trying to put himself in the shoes of student protesters, “I think much more important is what he does in the future.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

— Maya King and Reid J. Epstein Maya King reported from Atlanta, and Reid J. Epstein from Washington.