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How to refer to one's own words: speech-act modifying adverbials and the performative analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Anita Mittwoch
Anita Mittwoch
Affiliation:
Department of English, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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Extract

The performative analysis claims that every sentence we utter refers, self-reflexively, to our utterance of it, that every sentence comes equipped in its underlying structure with a higher performative clause of the form I (or Speaker) + Verb of Communication + You (or Hearer) (see especially Ross, 1970; Lakoff, 1971, 1972). The self-reflexive nature of the performative clause is brought out even more clearly by the addition of hereby, which functions as a deictic instrumental adverb referring to the utterance-act. In this paper I shall deal with two sets of data that have been invoked in support of this analysis and I shall try to show that on closer scrutiny they disconfirm it, at least in its generally accepted form. Both concern sentence adverbials that modify not the propositional content of the sentence to which they are attached but what I shall provisionally call the pragmatics of the speech situation; the solutions I shall suggest as an alternative to the performative analysis will, however, differ considerably for the two sets.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , September 1977 , pp. 177 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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