Page 438 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
gressive aspect, cf. 'I am requesting you (for the umpteenth time) to tell me your decision.' This has the illocutionary point of a request: the grounds for claiming it to be a statement about a request are no stronger than the grounds for claiming the same about 'I request you (for the umpteenth time) to tell me your decision.' A felicitously uttered 'That horse has won its third race in a row, and I'm betting you $10 it'll win on Saturday' has the illocutionary point of a bet, so H can justifiably reply, 'Y ou're on!' thereby taking up the bet, and expecting S to pay up when s/he loses (or vice versa).
Explicit performatives can be negative, e.g., the illo- cutionary force of a refusal can be borne by either 'I refuse your request' or, less likely, by the negative performative:
I d6nt grant (14) your request./
In 'I don't promise to come to your party, but I'll try to make it' S performs an act of not-promising (note the scope of the negative: an act of not-promising is entirely different from an act of promising not to do something, cf. 'I promise not to come to your party'). The illocution of a negative performative is sometimes contrasted with another illocution, e.g., in 'I don't order you to get home early, but I hope you won't be too late.' Here, the illocution of not-ordering is contrasted with the exhortation expressed in the second clause.
The negative with a performative cannot be used to deny that an (any) illocutionary act has taken place; but it can be used to deny a particular illocution. For instance, the words in (14) uttered with appropriate prosody (a disjuncture after 'don't,' and a lower pitch level for 'grant your request') will render it a para- phrase of (15):
I don't [as you claim] 'grant your request/ (15)
1. Introduction
/./ The Origins of Pragmatics
Among pragmaticians, there seems to be no agree- ment as to how to do pragmatics, nor as to what pragmatics is, nor how to define it, nor even as to what pragmatics is not (see Mey 1989). There seems to be agreement on one thing, however: pragmatics is a 'young' science, or (if one persists), pragmatics is the youngest subdiscipline of the venerable science
called linguistics (more on this difficult and sometimes stormy relationship below, Sect. 1.2).
Geoffrey Leech (1983) remarks that 'Fifteen years ago, it [viz., pragmatics] was mentioned by linguists rarely, if at all' (1983:1). And if indeed pragmatics was mentioned 'at all,' it was more in the guise of a 'ragbag' or, as the Israeli mathematician and formal linguistic philosopher Yehoshua Bar-Hillel (1971) once expressed it, a 'waste-paper basket' designed to
416
Pragmatics J. L. Mey
/
/grant your request./
I don't
(16)
Examples (15-16) are not refusals, but statements about a refusal.
Because the negative performative describes an act of not-doing, the adverb 'hereby' meaning 'in uttering this performative' must be placed before the negative, and not between it and the verb, cf. 'I do hereby not grant your request for more funds' and 'I hereby don't grant your request for more funds.' However, 'I don't hereby grant your request for more funds' does not make a refusal as such, but is instead a statement about a refusal, and is interpreted, 'I am not using this to grant your request for more funds' or 'I deny that I said or meant that "I hereby grant your request for more funds."'
To sum up the characteristics of explicit per- formative clauses: they must contain a verb that names the illocutionary point of the utterance; they must be in the present tense; in English they are typically in the simple aspect, but may be progressive; a performative clause must be 'realis' and denote the actualization of the illocutionary act; S must be agent for whoever takes responsibility for enforcing the illocutionary point of the utterance. An explicit performative clause may be negative; it may be emphatic; and it may contain the adverb 'hereby' meaning 'in/by uttering this performative.'
See also: Indirect Speech Acts; Speech Act Hierarchy; Speech Act Theory: Overview; Speech Acts and Grammar.
Bibliography
Austin J L 1975 In: Urmson J O, Sbisa M (eds.) How to do Things with Words. 2nd edn. Clarendon Press, Oxford