Speech Acts and Ventriloquation: The Contribution of Marina Sbisà to a General Theory of Action and Performativity

Abstract

Sbisà’s contributions to philosophy of language, pragmatics, and semiotics have been a wonderful source of inspiration for many scholars interested in speech act theory. Since the publication of her 1980 article with Paolo Fabbri (“Models (?) for a Pragmatic Analysis”), she has indeed encouraged us, following Greimas’s work, to focus on the transformative dimension of speech acts, that is, their actional dimension. While speech act theory is still today mainly mobilized to study what people do when they communicate with each other, her contributions allow us to account, more generally, for how other-than-humans do things with or without words. Her semiotic reinterpretation of speech act theory reminds us what pragmatics owes to pragmatism as a philosophical movement—a movement that acknowledges the multiple agencies that compose our world and bring it into being. In this world, situations confirm or contradict what we believe to be true, arrows indicate where we should proceed to go to the restroom, and agreements commit signatories to a set of shared principles. In this chapter, I pay homage to Sbisà’s work by showing how it leads us to an investigation of what I call the ventriloquial dimension of communication. For communication to occur, something or someone always needs to be made to say or do things, which is the essence of ventriloquism. I show how this interpretation of communication allows us to reconsider how speech acts function.