Joint work with Sven Lauer, Stanford University
The talk will present and expand on our paper for Sinn und Bedeutung 15, available here.

Searle (1989) posits a set of adequacy criteria for any account of the meaning and use of performative verbs, such as "order", "promise", or "claim". Central among them are: (a) performative utterances are performances of the act named by the performative verb; (b) performative utterances are self-verifying; (c) performative utterances achieve (a) and (b) in virtue of their literal meaning; (d) there is no ambiguity between the reportative and performative uses of the relevant verbs. He then argues that the fundamental problem with assertoric accounts of performatives is that they fail (b), and hence (a), because being committed to having an intention does not guarantee having that intention. In this talk I present an assertoric analysis of performatives that does not require an actual intention for the successful performance of the relevant act. It thus delivers on all of (a-d). It also explains why verbs in the progressive cannot be used performatively, it predicts which verbs can give rise to explicit performative utterances, and it accounts for the connection between performative use and the meaning of "hereby".

The analysis rests on the assumption that the conventional effect of assertions is to bring about a doxastic commitment on the part of the speaker and takes explicit performative verbs to denote communicative events that bring about speaker commitments to a belief or an intention. Commitments are construed as changing the world by making certain future states impossible, namely those futures in which the agent does not act according to the commitment, yet is not at fault, unless the commitment has been voided.

Abstract

I'll talk about a paper that is to appear in NLLT, downloadable here.

Numerous languages permit an NP that is not selected by the verb to be added to a clause, with several different possible interpretations. We divide such non-selected arguments into possessor, benefactive, attitude holder, and affected experiencer categories, on the basis of syntactic and semantic differences between them. We propose a formal analysis of the affected experiencer construction. In our account, a syntactic head Aff(ect) introduces the experiencer argument, and adds a conventional implicature to the effect that any event of the type denoted by its syntactic sister is the source of the experiencer's psychological experience. Hence, our proposal involves two tiers of meaning: the truth-conditional meaning of the sentence, and non-truth-conditional meaning (an implicature). A syntactic head can introduce material on both tiers. Additionally, we allow two parameters of variation: (i) the height of the attachment of A, and (ii) how much of the semantics is truth-conditional and how much an implicature. We show that these two parameters account for the attested variation across our sample of languages, as well as the signicant commonalities among them. Our analysis also accounts for signicant differences between affected experiencers and the other types of non-selected arguments, and we also note a generalization to the effect that purely non-truth-conditional non-selected arguments can only be weak or clitic pronouns.

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I have been giving talks about imperatives since 2005 (January 2005 in Kyoto, to be precise), thereby mostly focussing on matters of free choice. This time I will apply the theory developed so far to sentences composed of both an imperative and a declarative sentence (or what some call pseudo-imperatives and others IaD's and IoD's).