Page 492 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
invitation because it has the H-oriented (fall-)rise on the tag. Compare the instructional imperative with a positive tag that has the S-dominant (rise-) fall tone: Sit down./will you meaning 'S proposes to H that H do A and asks that H agree to do A.' Notice that H can more readily refuse the invitation than the instruction. Negative imperatives are used only with positive tags; for example, Don't get lost,Iwill you? 'S proposes to H that H not get lost and asks that H agree not to get lost.' The reason why *Don't get lost, won't you is not heard can be seen from the anomaly of'S proposes to H that H not get lost unless H does not want to agree to not get lost' or, more simply, 'Don't get lost if you don't want to.'
When 'S says that p," it implies satisfaction of the preparatory condition that'S believes that />'; if S has any doubts, it is cooperative to express them, as in Jack's in his room, I think. Or S may venture that p but immediately check with H the truth ofp (perhaps to flatter H) by using a tag question of opposite polarity to the declarative main clause: Jack's in his room,/isn't he? Jack Isn't in his room,!is he? Many clauses exist in English to express S's doubts about satisfaction of the preparatory conditions on an illo- cutionary act; others are I promise to come if I can. If I 've offended you, I apologize. Is Jack in his room, do
you know? Can you tell me whether Jack's in today?
S may signal uncertainty that H will believe him/her: Would you believe that Joe and Edna have separated? S's awareness of the potential violation of the cooperative maxim of quantity is signaled by the clause underlined in Did you know that Max has a new
job? And if S wants to discourse on a topic whose introductory proposition is known to H, s/he will say Max hatescats,asyou know,but hisnewgirlfriend has sixteen! S may thank H for his/her trouble and/or explicitly seek H's cooperation, as in / 'd be grateful if you could show it to me if you don't mind. The word please means more or less 'do A if it pleases you but don't if not' and thus appears to give H the option of refusing, although H cannot refuse without serious affront to S's face: Two coffees, please. Please be advised your account is overdue. S may excuse poten- tially impertinent questions with may I ask and imper- tinent statements with if I may say so. There are rhetorical requests for permission as in May I say how happy I am to be here tonight. S may try to deflect opprobrium by saying / 'm afraid I must ask you to leaveimmediately,sir.Iregretthatyourapplication has beenunsuccessful. Alternatively, Siscongratulatoryin / am delighted to inform you that your application has been successful. In all such cases, and many additional ones, there is an illocutionary addition to the utterance whose primary function is to ease social interactive behavior.
Of course, S may cancel an illocution, too, replacing it with another; for example, / 'm sorry I called you an asshole, asshole or I advise you, or warn you rather, not to stroke the carpet viper.
2. The Representationof Dlocationary Force in Grammar
It appears that no model of syntax incorporates a representation of illocutionary force; but that was not the case during the late 1960s and early 1970s in the heyday of 'performative analysis' in transformational grammar. Ross (1970: 261) claimed that 'every deep structure contains one and only one performative as its highest clause':
[S[NP^] [vpPERFORMATIVE VERB (you)
[sNONPERFORMATTVE SENTENCEs]vp]s]
This was wrong, and so was the claim that a sentential phrase marker can contain one, and only one, per- formative. Ross (1970) presented 14arguments based on almost unrelated bits of data in support of the hypothesis that the highest clause of every declarative sentence is a performative verb of stating. Every one of Ross's arguments has been assuredly refuted (along with additional ones in Lakoff 1972 and Sadock 1974) by Anderson (1971), Fraser (1974), Harnish (1975), and Allan (1986: 258ff.). Despite the overwhelming counterevidence, Ross's hypothesis was widely accepted for a decade.
Although Ross introduced the performative analy- sis within a syntactic framework, many of its cham- pions (e.g., Lakoff and Sadock) discussed it within a kind of grammar known as 'generative semantics.' Generative semantics was named for the fact that its initial symbols represent semantic components set into structures based on a hybrid of predicate logic and natural language syntax; the structures were then rearranged in various ways by transformations before having lexicon items mapped onto them; after that, further transformational rules would rearrange or delete nodes to produce a final derived structure. Because it started from a semantic source, generative semantics could, in principle, represent illocutionary force—which is not a syntactic category, but a seman- tic, or more accurately, a pragmatic entity. Since the demise of generative semantics, the representation of illocutionary force in grammar has been ignored. The best hope is for someone to incorporate it into some kind of logico-semantic system such as model-the- oretic truth-conditional semantics. The first steps in such a program have been undertaken by Searle and
Vanderveken (1985) and Vanderveken (1990-91); but the development of illocutionary logic proceeds inde- pendently of the development of model-theoretic sem- antics.
Bibliography
Allan K 1986 Linguistic Meaning, vol. 2. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London
Anderson S R 1971 On the Linguistic Status of the Per- formative-Constative Distinction. Indiana University
Linguistics Club, Bloomington, IN
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