[Lingtyp] optative sentences

[Juergen Bohnemeyer]

Dear Christian – According to my understanding of speech act theory, the only way for an utterance to fail to perform a speech act is by being infelicitous. (This generalization hinges on the definition of ‘utterance.’ I believe that the generalization holds, at least in first approximation, if ‘utterance’ is understood as a minimal ‘turn-constructing unit’ in the sense of conversation analysis.) Therefore, your examples in (2) must have illocutionary force unless they happen to be infelicitous, which would presumably depend on the context (as there is nothing obvious in the sentences themselves that would render them infelicitous).

On the classification developed by Searle (1976) and Searle & Vanderveken (1985), these utterances would be ‘expressives’, which Searle & Vanderveken define as follows:

“The expressive point is to express feelings and attitudes. In utterances with the expressive point the speaker expresses some psychological attitude about the state of affairs represented by the propositional content.” (S&V p38)

Now, Searle (and Searle & Vanderveken) claim(s) the classification of speech acts into ‘assertions’, ‘directives’, ‘commissives’, ‘declarations’, and ‘expressives’ to be exhaustive. To me, this seems rather implausible. So there may well be a superior classification to be had, which may place your examples under a different category. And perhaps an exhaustive classification of speech acts without a remainder category is in fact impossible. The problem of classifying speech acts strikes me rather analogous to that of classifying semantic roles.

Best – Juergen

Searle, J. R. (1976). A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society 5(1): 1-23.

Searle, J. R. & D. Vanderveken. (1985). Foundations of illocutionary logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
Professor, Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo

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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Christian Lehmann via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Date: Sunday, August 25, 2024 at 12:14
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: [Lingtyp] optative sentences
Dear colleagues,

since my master’s thesis (admittedly, a couple years ago), I have been struggling with the manifestation of volition in grammar. Please consider the following contrast:

There is one type of utterances which communicate to the hearer that the speaker wants P. Like a command, they appeal to him to see to it that P be realized. This is explicit in (1a).

(1)(a) Please shut the window!

    (b) The window should be shut.

In this sense, (1b) is an indirect speech act, but the type of volition conveyed is the same. One might say that (1)(a) and (b) share their illocutionary force.



There is another type of utterances which express that the speaker wishes P. They are exclamations which do not appeal to anybody for fulfillment of P:

(2)(a) If only Linda arrived in time!

    (b) The devil take him!

Sentences of type #2 are introduced by utinam in Latin, ojalá in Spanish, and so forth. Such particles are not used in sentences of type #1.



Also, unfulfillable wishes (traditionally: irreal optative sentences) are fine and common as type #2, but in type #1 produce utterances hard to interpret.



Here are my questions to you:

·         Is there an established conceptual and terminological distinction between these two types? How about (1) volitive and (2) optative?

·         Does type #2 have an illocutionary force? Do exclamations have an illocutionary force?
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Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
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