Introducing English Linguistics

Felicity/appropriateness conditions
For a speech act to be successful, it needs to satisfy a series of conditions
referred to as either felicity or appropriateness conditions. Searle (1969)
proposes four such conditions: propositional content, preparatory, sincer-
ity, and essential. To understand how these conditions work, it is useful to
see how they apply to a very common type of speech act, the apology.
According to Thomas (1995: 99f.), an apology, schematized within
Searle’s typology, would have the following structure:
Propositional act: S [speaker] expresses regret for a past act A of S 
Preparatory condition: S believes that A was not in H’s [hearer’s] best interest 
Sincerity condition: Speaker regrets act A 
Essential condition: Counts as an apology for act A
Propositional condition: Any speech act has to have propositional content,
i.e., be expressed in a form conventionally associated with the speech
act. Apologies, as noted earlier, are typically marked with either the
performative verb apologize or an expression such as I’m sorry:
I apologize for the urgency on this, but to get it through to the
Department of the Environment it has to be lodged at the beginning of
February and then up to them by by March 
(BNC JA5 593)
Preparatory condition: Before making an apology, the speaker obviously
has to believe that he/she has done something requiring an apology.
In the above example, the speaker makes an apology because she
believes that requiring her work staff to do a considerable amount of
work on short notice requires an apology.
Sincerity condition: A key component of any apology is that the speaker be
sincerely sorry for what he/she has done. Because the above statement
is made in a work context, where the speaker is higher on the power
hierarchy than the people to whom the apology is directed, many
might doubt the speaker’s sincerity and dismiss the apology as per-
functory, i.e. as something said by a superior in passing. Obviously,
whatever interpretation is made would be heavily dependent on the
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INTRODUCING ENGLISH LINGUISTICS

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superior’s relationship with her workers, their past perceptions of
her, and so forth.
Essential condition: If the apology is not perceived as sincere, then the
speech act will ultimately fail: while it may have the form of an apolo-
gy and be directed towards some past situation requiring an apology, if
it is not accepted as an apology, the speech act becomes meaningless.
Although all speech acts must satisfy each condition to be successful,
many speech acts are distinguished by the different ways that they satisfy
the individual conditions. For instance, the propositional condition for a
representative is that it must be a statement that can be confirmed as
either true or false:
Between 20 June 1294 and 24 March 1298 England and France were for-
mally and publicly at war 
(ICE-GB W2A-010 003)
I went and saw their house the other night 
(SBCSAE)
That looks like succotash to me it’s got peas and lima beans 
(SBCSAE)
Other speech acts, in contrast, do not have this constraint. A request, a
type of directive, cannot be true or false, since the act of asking for some-
thing has no truth value:
On behalf of Nether Wyresdale Parish Council I request that the follow-
ing alterations/improvements be made to the play equipment on Scorton
Playing Field 
(BNC HPK 114)
Oh what are you doing? Oh shut up. Go away. 
(BNC KBH 747)
Requests differ further from other kinds of speech acts because, as Searle
(1969: 66) notes, “Order and command have the additional preparatory rule that
S must be in a position of authority over H.” Thus, the effectiveness of both of
the directives above depends crucially upon whether the individuals uttering
the directives have power over those to whom the directives are issued.
The philosopher H. Paul Grice proposed the