The Language of Control in Victorian Children’s Literature

Abstract

J. L. Austin’s theory of speech acts proposes that all utterances should be seen as performing three acts simultaneously: a locutionary act (which roughly corresponds to the dictionary meaning of the utterance); an illocutionary act (the act the speaker intends to perform in making the utterance); and a perlocutionary act (the effect the utterance has on the listener). As Austin says, there are hundreds of different illocutionary acts, sometimes, but certainly not always, cued by particular verbs, like urge, advise, warn or request. As regards the language of control — we have borrowed this term from the sociologist Basil Bernstein — such illocutionary acts might include: urging, advising, exhorting, threatening, warning, requesting, and so on.