Speech-Act, Communication-Act, and Generality

The Communication-Act theory of Language has one important advantage over the Speech-Act theory. Both explain the specificity of Language, i. e. both types of Act are concrete events. But, Language is general, as well, which entails syntactical and/or semantic components that survive the immediacy of a given utterance. That the Speech-Act theory is an inadequate ground of Language's generality is evinced by Austin's respect for the non-performative status of Propositions, i. e. his Locutionary and Constative categories, which implicitly concedes to e. g. Logicism, the exclusivity and the self-sufficiency of a transcendent source of generality, e. g. an objective ontology, an a priori structure, etc. In contrast, the Communication-Act theory need make no such concession. For, generality is immanent to Communication, which entails a plurality of participants, and a commonality amongst them, which, in turn, suffices to ground the generality of Language, i. e. without common linguistic structures and meanings, communication would be impossible.