Abstract
Subsentential speech acts are subsentential utterances by means of which one “makes moves in a language game”, i.a. asserts, requests, asks, etc. I’m going to propose a pragmatics-oriented account of such acts based on Recanati’s moderate relativism. Pace Recanati and following Perry, I’ll argue that at least in the case of subsentential speech acts we have to postulate unarticulated constituents in explicit contents as well as in the situations of evaluation. I’ll suggest a test which helps to determine which constituents belong where. I’ll also argue – somewhat paradoxically – that subsentential speech acts are not an argument in favour of contextualism in any interesting sense.
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Notes
- 1.
In fact the picture is more complex: for instance, neither Stanley (2007) nor Corazza (see below) fit easily to these groups. Stanley suggests a “divide and conquer” strategy, according to which alleged subsentential speech acts belong to one of three categories: they are either ellipses, whose linguistic antecedents are raised to salience by context, or are not speech acts because their content and/or force is not determinate, or else are shorthands. See Stanley 2007. His view was thoroughly criticised by Elugardo and Stainton (2004). I also need to add that both Merchant and Stainton admit that some examples of subsentential utterances escape their proposed analyses. Thus, for instance, Stainton writes: “My burden is merely to argue that syntactic ellipsis is not the whole story; I’m happy for it to be part of the story” (2006a: 94), while Merchant observes that there are nonsentential structures that are not “amenable to an elliptical analysis” (2006: 73).
- 2.
According to Perry there are also unarticulated constituents that are part of the content. These are the things that the proposition is about. So for instance, if I say “It’s raining” while looking out of the window, the place I’m talking about (i.e. the place at which I make my utterance) is something that my utterance concerns, but if I say this thinking of a different place, then that place (which is cognitively represented by me) will be a thing that the utterance is about. See below.
- 3.
Nota bene Corazza – following Perry – claims that one grasps reflexive truth-conditions just by being linguistically competent.
- 4.
I do not mean by this that the content has to be fully determinate. Thus, unlike Stanley (2007: 44), I’m prepared to grant that “a thirsty man who staggers up to a street vendor and utters: (…) water” has made a speech act.
- 5.
Corazza stresses that Perry’s pluri-propositionalism does not amount to the claim that more than one proposition is necessarily expressed by one sentence. Reflexive truth conditions are not the proposition expressed. It is incremental truth-conditions that play the role of asserted content. See Corazza 2011: 564.
- 6.
More precisely, Corazza writes that “a communicative act can be said to be successful inasmuch as the speaker and her audience are co-situated and the action-related output of the speaker and her audience is positive” (Corazza 2011: 578).
- 7.
In Perspectival Thought (2007: 252) there is one example of subsentential speech (“Very handsome!” used as a comment on someone’s appearance), but as far as I’m aware Recanati has never discussed subsentential speech acts in any detail.
- 8.
I agree with the remark that Recanati makes in footnote 98 that Perry’s original description of his scenario also makes it seem like an ellipsis, for the son utters “It’s raining” in reply to Perry’s question: “How are things there?” (see Perry 1986). In order to exclude the ellipsis analysis we may modify the scenario slightly and assume that the son’s utterance is not made in reply to any question and has no linguistic antecedent.
- 9.
The inter-contextual disquotational indirect reports test has been proposed by Cappelen and Lepore (2005: 88) for an entirely different purpose: as one of their context-sensitivity tests (which supposedly demonstrates that expressions like “ready”, “tall” or “knows” are not context-sensitive). Nb. In my opinion this test does not deliver the results that Cappelen and Lepore wanted.
- 10.
This understanding of the debate is also accepted by Recanati in Truth-Conditional Pragmatics, where he says that the only substantial debate between truth-conditional pragmatics and minimalism is the one concerning the determinants of the intuitive what is said (Recanati 2010: 13–14).
- 11.
Compare here Recanati’s remarks on I-Minimalism (2010: 14; esp. footnote 11).
- 12.
Stainton argues that nonsentential assertions have propositional literal asserted content but he does not claim that phrases used to make such assertions express propositions. On the contrary, he says that e.g. “Moving pretty fast” “doesn’t express a proposition, even after reference is assigned to indexicals and such”, “even once its contextual parameters have been saturated, it still refers to a function from objects to truth-values” (Stainton 2006b: 17, his emphasis). For his understanding of the debate and of the notion of what is said see Stainton 2006b: 223–225.
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Acknowledgements
The research for this paper was possible thanks to the support of National Science Centre, Poland (grant OPUS 8; research project UMO-2014/15/B/HS1/00171).
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Odrowąż-Sypniewska, J. (2020). Subsentential Speech Acts: A Situated Contextualist Account. In: Ciecierski, T., Grabarczyk, P. (eds) The Architecture of Context and Context-Sensitivity. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 103. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34485-6_15
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