Following John Ross, who first proposed the performative analysis of a sentence
(i.e., explicitly identifying the performative formula definining the
illocutionary force of a sentence),
the abstract-performative theory posits that the highest semantic clause of
the semantic representation of a sentence provides: a subject referring to the
speaker, an indirect object referring to the addressee and a verb referring
to a performative verb. Illocutionary force is then that aspect of a
sentence's meaning
that corresponds to the highest clause in its semantic
representation, i.e. a performative formula.
Sadock distinguishes semantic sense from interpreted sense (meaning from use) on the basis of three groups of formal properties (cooccurrence properties, paraphrase properties, grammatical properties) Illocutionary force is part of the pragmatic meaning of a sentence. Sadock suggests that illocutionary acts are special cases of perlocutionary acts, because they to have an effect that is posterior to the speech act. TM, ®, Copyright © 2015 Piero Scaruffi |