On the semantics and pragmantics of explicit performatives [Elektronische Ressource] : a parenthetical experiment / vorgelegt von Verena M. Mayer

V.Mayer

Informations

• Publié par: goethe_universitat_frankfurt_am_main
• Publié le: 01 janvier 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 67
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

On the Semantics and Pragmatics of Explicit Perfor-
matives: A Parenthetical Experiment


Inauguraldissertation
zur Erlangung des Grades eines Doktors der Philosophie im
Fachbereich Neuere Philologien der Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe
Universität zu Frankfurt am Main


Vorgelegt von Verena M. Mayer
aus: Memmingen

2006
(Einreichungsjahr)

2009
(Erscheinungsjahr)

1. Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Thomas E. Zimmermann
2. Gutacher: Prof. Dr. Jörg Meibauer

Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 13. Dezember 2006





Acknowledgements

Before I go into detail, I would like to thank a number of people due to whom I had
a great time in the graduate school (in spite of the fact that I had to write my the-
sis…).
Of course, first of all I thank Thomas Ede Zimmermann, who advised me in the
truest sense of the word and thaught me not only a big amount in semantics but has
also showed me that puzzling is real fun.
I also want to thank all of the current and former postdocs of the graduate school.
In particular, to one of my best friends Christian Plunze - not only for demonstrat-
ing how to quit smoking easily, Rick Nouwen who helped me in getting started
formalizing and Joost Kremers who caused my addiction to Asian food – espe-
cially No. 44.
Moreover, special thanks to Magdalena Roguska, Marina Stoyanowa and Jiro
Inaba(san).
Finally, yet importantly I thank my family.














2

Preface 6

I. Speech Acts: A Framework 11
1 Utterance Meaning 12
1.1 THE LOCUTIONARY ACT 13
1.2. THE ILLOCUTIONARY ACT 14
1.3 THE PERLOCUTIONARY ACT 16

2 The Relation between Sentence Types and
Illocutionary Forces 18
2.1 PRAGMATIC CHARACTERIZATIONS OF MOOD 20
2.2 THE SEMANTIC CHARACTERIZATION OF MOOD 23

3 The Meanings of Non-Declarative Sentences 27
3.1 INTERROGATIVES 27
3.1.1 THE SEMANTICS OF INTERROGATIVES (GROENENDJIK & STOKHOF, 1984) 28
3.1.2 QUESTION ACTS AS BASIC SPEECH ACTS 32
3.2 IMPERATIVES 33

4 Utterance Meaning over again 37
4.1 CONTEXT AND COMMON GROUND 39
4.2 SENTENCE TYPES, SENTENCE MEANINGS, AND UTTERANCES 40
4.3 THE DETERMINATION OF UTTERANCE MEANING AND THE FUNCTION OF
SPEECH ACTS TO CHANGE CONTEXTS 42
4.3.1 THE CONTEXT CHANGE OF ASSERTIVE SPEECH ACTS 48
4.3.2 THE CONTEXT CHANGE OF QUESTION ACTS: 50
4.3.3 THE CONTEXT CHANGE OF DIRECTIVE SPEECH ACTS 51








3

II.The Semantics and Pragmatics of Explicit Performatives 54

1 Pretheoretical Characteristics of Explicit Performatives 55
1.1. PERFORMATIVE VERBS 55
1.2. THE SUBJECT 56
1.3. TENSE AND ASPECT 56
1.4. EMBEDDING 57
1.5. THE ADVERB HEREBY 58
1.6. HEDGED PERFORMATIVES 58
1.7. NEGATION 59

2 The Semantic Mood of Explicit Performatives 60
2.1 THE PROPOSITIONAL MEANING 60
2.2 THE PROTOTYPICAL ASSERTIVE SPEECH ACT 61

3 Posing the Problem of a Semantic Analysis of Explicit Performatives 67
3.1 TWO PRETHEORETICAL FACTS ABOUT EXPLICIT PERFORMATIVES 67
3.2 THE PUZZLE 68

4 A Parenthetical Analysis of Explicit Performatives 71
4.1 AN ANALYSIS OF EXPLICIT PARENTHETICALS 72
4.1.1 THE SEMANTICS OF EXPLICIT PARENTHETICALS 72
4.1.2 THE DISAMBIGUATION OF THE ILLOCUTIONARY FORCE POTENTIAL 75
4.1.3 CONTRADICTION AND REDUNDANCY 77
4.1.4 INTERIM CONCLUSION 84
4.1.5 THE STRUCTURAL AMBIGUITY OF ‘PERFORMATIVE’ VERBS 84

4.2 THE APPLICATION OF THE PARENTHETICAL ANALYSIS TO EXPLICIT
PERFORMATIVES 96
4.2.1 THE SEMANTICS OF EXPLICIT PERFORMATIVE SENTENCES 98
4.2.2 THE STRUCTURE OF EXPLICIT PERFORMATIVE UTTERANCES 100

4.3 COMPLEMENT CLAUSES AND CONTEXT CHANGE 104
4.3.1 THE SEMANTIC MOOD OF COMPLEMENTS 105
4.3.2 THE CONTEXT CHANGE OF EXPLICIT PERFORMATIVES 107
4.3.2.1 Disambiguation Reloaded 111
4.3.2.2 Redundancy Reloaded 117
4.3.2.3 An “Assertive Remark” 120
4

4.3.3 THE PROBLEM OF A UNIFORM SEMANTICS OF THE COMPLEMENTS USED TO
PERFORM DIRECTIVE AND COMMISSIVE SPEECH ACTS 122
4.3.3.1 That-Complements, First Person, and De Se 124
4.3.3.2 PRO and Object Control Verbs 126
4.3.3.3 The Semantic Mood of the PRO-Complements and that-
Complements Embedded under Directive and Commissive Verbs 129
4.3.3.4 The Context Change of Directive and Commissive Speech Acts 132

5 The Discourse Function of Conventional Illocutionary Acts 135
5.1 DP-Complements and ∅ -Complements 140




III. Embedding 142
1 Speech Act Adverbials 143
2 Hedged Performatives 147
2.1 THE PARENTHETICAL ANALYSIS OF HEDGED PERFORMATIVES -
REINTERPRETATION 147
2.2 MODALITY – A SHORT INTRODUCTION 152
3 Negated Explicit Performative Utterances 156
4 The Progressive Aspect 163


Summary and Closing Remarks 169

References 172


5

Preface
John L. Austin’s (1961,1962) famous contribution to the philosophy of language is
his observation that whenever a speaker makes an utterance to an addressee, he
performs a speech act, such as stating something, making a request to the addressee
to do something, asking a question and thereby seeking for information, making a
promise and committing himself to do something, etc.
One distinction Austin makes in relation to performatives is that between implicit
performatives and explicit performatives. The intended illocutionary force of the
utterance of the imperative Don’t go there!, for example, is implicit, as what the
speaker has in mind by saying it is not specifically provided. Due to the implicit
nature of the sentence, the imperative Don’t go there! can be, depending on the
information about the previous discourse, on kinesic cues given by the speaker, and
on the power or status of the relationship between speaker and hearer, a warning, a
command, a request or an advice. In order to make the illocutionary force explicit,
the speaker has to indicate the speech act involved by adding in what is called the
performative verb, or the performative prefix before the clause. If the clause is not
declarative, this will involve its grammatical conversion into a declarative clause: I
warn you not to go there, I order you not to go there, I advise you not to go there
etc. Since performatives are seldom uttered using such a construction, it does seem
to be the case that most of the performatives are implicit.
As, I will show in more detail later, explicit performatives are uttered whenever the
contextual information does not suffice for the determination of the illocutionary
force of the corresponding implicit speech act. Thus, for instance, if the contextual
information is not sufficient to determine that the intended illocutionary force of
the utterance of I will be there for you is a promise, the speaker uses the explicit
performative sentence I promise you that I will be there for you in order to provide
the missing information.

If we want to develop a semantic analysis for explicit performatives, we are faced
with the following puzzle:
In order to account for the speech act expressed by the performative verb, one can
assume that the so-called performative clause is purely performative and provides
the illocutionary force of the speech act whose content is given by the semantic
object denoted by the complement clause. Yet under this perspective, the perfor-
mative clause that is, next to the performative verb, the indexicals I and you that
refer to the speaker and to the addressee of the utterance context is semantically
invisible and does not contribute compositionally its meaning to the meaning of the
entire explicit performative sentence. Conversely, if we account for the truth condi-
tional contribution of the performative clause and deny that the meaning of the
performative verb is purely performative, then we have to find a way to account for
the speech act expressed by the performative verb.

6

Of course, there is already the widely accepted and very appealing indirectness
account for explicit performative utterances developed by Bach & Harnish (1979).
Roughly, Bach and Harnish solve this puzzle in deriving the performativity, more
precisely the illocutionary force, by means of a pragmatic inference process (their
speech act schema). According to them, the important speech act performed by
means of the utterance of the explicit performative sentence is a kind of the con-
ventionalized indirect speech act.
However, the boundary between semantics and pragmatics can be drawn in many
various ways. Therefore, I think there could be other perspectives regarding the
interface between the truth-functional treatment of the declarative explicit perfor-
mative sentences and the speech acts performed with their utterances, which are
expressed by the performative verbs. Hence, this thesis consists in the experiment
to develop a further analysis and to check out its consequences with respect to the
seman