Abstract
Speech acts have sometimes been considered as not embeddable, for principled reasons. In this paper, I argue that illocutionary acts can be embedded under certain circumstances. I provide for a semantic interpretation of illocutionary acts as functions from world/time indices to world/time indices, which provides them with a semantic type, and allows for operators that take them as arguments. I will illustrate this with three cases: First, with illocutionary acts as arguments of verbs like tell, second, as semantic objects modified by speech act adverbials like frankly and third, with Austinian conditionals. By these exemplary cases, I show that illocutionary acts (or rather, speech-act potentials) become part of the recursive structure of language.
This paper had a long gestation period. It is part of ongoing work on the nature of speech acts and the interaction of It profited tremendously from comments of audiences on presentations of related material at Stanford University, University of California at Santa Cruz, the World Congress of Linguists in Seoul, the recursion conference in Amherst in 2009, the conference on sentence types and illocutionary acts at ZAS Berlin in 2010, and a talk at New York University, April 2013. The current paper focuses in particular on the issue of recursion of speech acts within the more general topic. There are too many colleagues that, in one way or other, had influence on the points to be presented here, but I should at least mention Chris Barker, Arik Cohen, Hans-Martin Gärtner, Andreas Haida, Sophie Repp, Anna Szabolcsi, Hubert Truckenbrodt, and Tom Roeper. Work on this topic is supported by a grant of the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF, Förderkennzeichen 01UG0711) to the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft; the responsibilities remain with the author.
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Notes
- 1.
There are additional factors that influence the meaning of a complex expressions. First, the meaning of the constituents may be shifted by semantic operators, e.g. the type shift of names to quantifiers in cases like John and every girl (cf. Partee 1987), the aspectual type shift of semelfactives to iterative activities in the light blinked for hours (cf. Moens and Steedman 1988), and metonymic type shifts as in begin the book discussed in Pustejovsky (1995) or the ham sandwich discussed in Nunberg (1977). Second, the linguistic and extra-linguistic context may influence the meaning, as in suppressing implausible interpretations of ambiguous expressions and in specifying the values of variables and indexical expressions. Third, the availability of other expressions in the language may lead to pragmatic optimization, also ruling out certain interpretations that otherwise would be available; e.g. an indefinite noun phrase suggests non-uniqueness as otherwise a definite noun phrase would be used.
- 2.
In naming semantic types, I follow the convention that (σ)τ denotes the type of functions from meanings of type σ to meanings of type τ; if σ is a simple type, parentheses are omitted. Simple types are e for entities and t for truth values; see below for additional simple types.
- 3.
The only argument that Lewis gives is that the sentence-radical view would not allow for a treatment of constituent questions like Who came?, and encouragements like Hurrah for Mary! But this is clearly not the case. Constituent questions can be treated like polarity questions if we assume that their sentence radical denotes a set of propositions or a structured proposition. Encouragements can be seen as speech acts that require a person-denoting referential expression as radical; in our example, hurrah can be treated as an illocutionary operator applied to Mary.
- 4.
Thanks to Hans-Martin Gärtner who directed me towards that paper.
- 5.
In addition, there is a subjunctive form (Konjunktiv I) with special morphology: Maria sagte, dass sie John bewundere and Maria sagte, sie bewundere John. It generally indicates a speaker different from the speaker of the utterance context.
- 6.
In Krifka (2001) I assumed that both types of verbs embed question acts, but that verbs like know type-shift this question act to the set of true answers. This was designed to handle certain phenomena relating to quantification into embedded questions. Now, and even in 2001, I see advantages of the proposal of Krifka (1999); cf. also McCloskey (2005).
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Krifka, M. (2014). Embedding Illocutionary Acts. In: Roeper, T., Speas, M. (eds) Recursion: Complexity in Cognition. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 43. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05086-7_4
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