Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives

518 Pages·1994·3.26 MB·English

by  Savas L. Tsohatzidis

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Cover
title: Foundations of Speech Act Theory : Philosophical and Linguistic
Perspectives
author: Tsohatzidis, Savas L.
publisher: Taylor & Francis Routledge
isbn10 | asin: 0415095247
print isbn13: 9780415095242
ebook isbn13: 9780203206478
language: English
subject Speech acts (Linguistics) , Language and languages--
Philosophy.
publication date: 1994
lcc: P95.55.F68 1994eb
ddc: 306.4/4
subject: Speech acts (Linguistics) , Language and languages--
Philosophy.
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Page i
Foundations of speech act theory
Although speech act notions are routinely accorded a role in theoretical discussions of the problem of meaning in
linguistics and philosophy, both the extent and the details of that role have not been investigated as deeply as they
deserve. The philosophers and linguists responsible for this volume’s twenty-two original papers make significant
advances toward raising the standards of debate in this research area, and their investigations into the semantic,
pragmatic and grammatical foundations of speech act theory will prove invaluable to scholars and postgraduate
students of the philosophy of language.
Savas L.Tsohatzidis is Associate Professor of General Linguistics at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He also
edited Meanings and Prototypes: Studies in Linguistic Categorization.
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Foundations of speech act theory
Philosophical and linguistic perspectives
Edited by Savas L.Tsohatzidis
London and New York
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First published in 1994
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
Editorial material and selection © 1994 Savas L.Tsohatzidis.
Individual chapters © 1994 individual contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 0-203-20647-9 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-30382-2 (OEB Format)
ISBN 0-415-09524-7 (Print Edition)
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Page v
Contents

List of contributors vii

Ways of doing things with words: an introduction 1
Savas L.Tsohatzidis

Part I Speech acts and semantic theory

1 Illocutionary acts and linguistic meaning 29
William P.Alston
2 Meaning, structure and speech acts 50
John T.Kearns
3 A semantics of utterance, formalized 80
D.S.Shwayder
4 A complete formulation of a simple logic of elementary illocutionary acts 99
Daniel Vanderveken
5 Semantic minimalism and the Frege point 132
Huw Price
6 Contextualism and anti-contextualism in the philosophy of language 156
François Récanati
7 On being truth-valued 167
Charles Travis
8 Illocution and its significance 187
Jennifer Hornsby
9 Anti-individualism and speech act theory 208
Steven Davis
10 The gap between speech acts and mental states 220
Savas L.Tsohatzidis
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11 Algebra of elementary social acts 234
Arthur Merin

Part II Speech acts and pragmatic theory

12 Semantic slack: what is said and more 267
Kent Bach
13 Relevance theory and speech acts 292
Graham H.Bird
14 Modular speech act theory: programme and results 312
Asa Kasher
15 Speech act theory and Gricean pragmatics: some differences of detail that make a difference 323
Marcelo Dascal
16 Are there indirect speech acts? 335
Rod Bertolet
17 Indirect speech acts and propositional content 350
David Holdcroft
18 Speaker meaning, sentence meaning and metaphor 365
Savas L.Tsohatzidis
19 On the vectoring of speech acts 374
David Harrah

Part III Speech acts and grammatical structure

20 Toward a grammatically realistic typology of speech acts 393
Jerrold M.Sadock
21 Mood, meaning and speech acts 407
Robert M.Harnish
22 Speech act classification, language typology and cognition 460
William Croft

Bibliography 478
Index 491
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Page vii
List of contributors
William P.Alston, Department of Philosophy, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, USA.
Kent Bach, Department of Philosophy, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California, USA.
Rod Bertolet, Department of Philosophy, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA.
Graham H.Bird, Department of Philosophy, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.
William Croft, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA,
and Max Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Marcelo Dascal, Department of Philosophy, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Steven Davis, Department of Philosophy, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.
Robert M.Harnish, Departments of Philosophy and Linguistics, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA.
David Harrah, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Riverside, California, USA.
David Holdcroft, Department of Philosophy, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK.
Jennifer Hornsby, Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Asa Kasher, Department of Philosophy, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
John T.Kearns, Department of Philosophy, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, USA.
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Arthur Merin, Department of Computational Linguistics, Logic and Philosophy of Language, University of Stuttgart,
Stuttgart, and Department of Philosophy, Logic and Theory of Science, University of Munich, Munich, Germany.
Huw Price, School of Philosophy, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
François Récanati, Centre de Recherche en Epistemologie Appliquée, Ecole Polytechnique/Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France.
Jerrold M.Sadock, Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
D.S.Shwayder, Department of Philosophy, University of Illinois at Urbana, Urbana, Illinois, USA.
Charles Travis, Department of Philosophy, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK.
Savas L.Tsohatzidis, Department of Linguistics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece.
Daniel Vanderveken, Département de Philosophie, Université du Quebec à Trois-Rivières, Trois-Rivières, Québec,
Canada.
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Page 1
Ways of doing things with words
An introduction
Savas L.Tsohatzidis
Suppose all you know about John is that, in uttering a certain sentence yesterday at 5 p.m., he either gave
permission to Mary to marry a linguist, or wished Mary to marry a linguist, or asked whether Mary is going to marry
a linguist, or predicted that Mary will marry a linguist, or objected to Mary’s marrying a linguist. Could you validly
infer, from this piece of disjunctive knowledge, that, no matter which one of these five things John might have done
in uttering the sentence, what he would have meant in uttering it would be the same? You certainly could not. And
this suggests that, in order to identify what a speaker means in uttering a sentence of his language, it is not enough
that you should know which individual he thereby purports to identify (for example, Mary) and which property he
thereby purports to, truly or falsely, ascribe to that individual (for example, the property of getting married to a
linguist at some point in the future)—to put it more generally, it is not enough that you should know which
proposition he purports to be expressing in uttering the sentence he utters. What is required, in addition, is that you
should know what is the meaning-determining act in the context of which he expresses that proposition-whether, for
example, he expresses it in the context of an act of giving permission, or in the context of an act of giving a wish, or
in the context of an act of asking a question, or in the context of an act of making a prediction, or in the context of
an act of raising an objection, and so on.
These are some of the acts that, under the generic name of illocutionary acts that was given them by Austin (1962),
constitute the primary subject matter of speech act theory. Why should they be deemed worthy of linguistic or
philosophical interest? The main reason derives from what has just been said of them—namely, that they appear to
be meaning—determining acts, in the sense that the identification of what a speaker means in uttering a sentence of
his language is not possible, even after the proposition he thereby purports to express has been identified, unless it
is further determined which one among the various types of acts of this kind he is engaged in performing by means
of his utterance. If this is so, and if the study of what speakers of a natural language mean by uttering sentences of
that language is, as it is generally acknowledged to be, a
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