Existential speech and the phenomenology of communication

pp. 84-107

in: Richard L. Lanigan, Speech act phenomenology, Berlin, Springer, 1977

Abstract

The thematic question with which we started in the initial chapter of this study was that formulated by Searle, namely, "How do words relate to the world?" It is this question which led us to examine speech acts, their structure and content, and their performance or process nature in the constitution of "communication" as a state of affairs. In short, we analyzed what language and speech seemed to be in view of how they are used in the ordinary discourse of common situations. In this chapter,¹⁹⁸ I wish to take the analysis one step further, and in a different direction, by examining how phenomena such as language and speech are constituted by a person who generates a "world" of such phenomena. It is, if you will, the phenomenological explanation that necessarily follows from the analytic description of human communication.¹⁹⁹