[Lingtyp] optative sentences

Tue Aug 27 13:18:12 UTC 2024

Dear Christian – While I can’t claim to fully understand your proposal, I’m quite skeptical regarding the use of morphosyntactic information in the classification of speech acts (but again, I’m not sure that’s what you’re arguing for), due to the pervasiveness of indirect speech acts, which by definition involve mismatches between illocution and sentence type. Plus, two of the standard sentence types, interrogatives and imperatives, map into the same speech act category in both Austin’s and Searle’s work – the category of directives.

A third consideration that carries weight here is the maxim that every utterance should perform exactly one speech act (ignoring “supporting acts,” which may or may not exist, but have often been invoked). This principle is critical to speech act theory and the broader theory of utterance meaning (i.e., pragmatics).

I do agree that it is regrettable that the relation between illocution and sentence type has been largely ignored ever since the Generative Semantics fracas.

Btw., Searle & Vanderveken do list examples of performative verbs for expressives (incl. _apologize_, _thank_, _condole_, _congratulate_, etc.), although none applies to the would-be expressive type we’ve been talking about. I don’t think the existence of such verbs should be considered critical to the definition of a speech act category. But the question why some speech acts are lexicalized and others are not is obviously important.

Best – Juergen

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

Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus
Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
Phone: (716) 645 0127
Fax: (716) 645 3825
Email: jb77 at buffalo.edu<mailto:jb77 at buffalo.edu>
Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/

Office hours Tu/Th 3:30-4:30pm in 642 Baldy or via Zoom (Meeting ID 585 520 2411; Passcode Hoorheh)

There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets In
(Leonard Cohen)
--

From: Christian Lehmann <christian.lehmann at uni-erfurt.de>
Date: Tuesday, August 27, 2024 at 06:29
To: Juergen Bohnemeyer <jb77 at buffalo.edu>, lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] optative sentences
Dear Jürgen and everybody,

on the one hand, questions like whether exclamations have illocutionary force may be decided per definitionem. On the other, these are concepts which are reflected in linguistic structure; therefore we try to define them so as to maximize their match with linguistic structure.

I modestly surmise that, from this point of view, Searle & Vanderveken's definition of 'expressives' produces a (linguistically) incoherent category, as it is meant to include, on the one hand,  congratulations, excuses and thanks, and on the other, exclamations like the ones I quoted before. These are two different categories: the former triple appeals to the hearer, exclamations do not.

Also, exclamative sentences constitute a sentence type in many languages, beside the basic sentence types of declarative, directive and interrogative. However, there are performative verbs for these latter (as there are performative verbs for congratulations, excuses and thanks) , while there is no performative verb for exclamations like 'I hereby exclaim that p.' It therefore remains to be plausibilized that exclamations "perform a speech act", as you say. But again, this may be a matter of definition.

At any rate, from a linguistic point of view, the uppermost division of utterances might be into interactive and exclamative ones. And the entire business of illocution would develop inside the category of interactive utterances.

Sorry for bothering the list of linguistic typology with semantic and maybe pragmatic issues. However, we do typological comparison on the basis of functional categories and operations; and all the while I am trying to systematize these.

Best,
Christian
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Am 25.08.24 um 15:55 schrieb 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

Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus
Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
Phone: (716) 645 0127
Fax: (716) 645 3825
Email: jb77 at buffalo.edu<mailto:jb77 at buffalo.edu>
Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/

Office hours Tu/Th 3:30-4:30pm in 642 Baldy or via Zoom (Meeting ID 585 520 2411; Passcode Hoorheh)

There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets In
(Leonard Cohen)
--

From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org><mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Christian Lehmann via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org><mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Date: Sunday, August 25, 2024 at 12:14
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org><mailto: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?
--

Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
Rudolfstr. 4
99092 Erfurt
Deutschland
Tel.:
+49/361/2113417
E-Post:
christianw_lehmann at arcor.de<mailto:christianw_lehmann at arcor.de>
Web:
https://www.christianlehmann.eu<https://www.christianlehmann.eu/>

--

Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
Rudolfstr. 4
99092 Erfurt
Deutschland
Tel.:
+49/361/2113417
E-Post:
christianw_lehmann at arcor.de<mailto:christianw_lehmann at arcor.de>
Web:
https://www.christianlehmann.eu<https://www.christianlehmann.eu/>

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