Commitment: The term and the notions

Abstract

This volume brings together thoroughly reworked versions of a selection of papers presented at the conference The Notion of Commitment in Linguistics, held at the University of Antwerp in January 2007. It is the companion volume to a collection of essays in French to be published in Langue Française and devoted to La notion de prise en charge. Commitment is a close counterpart toprise en charge, and two contributors, Celle and Lansari, use it essentially as a translation of the French term. However, commitment and its verbal cognates (to commit NP to and to be committed to) do not cover the exact same range of meanings as prise en charge. For a thorough assessment of the French term, we refer readers to the introduction to the Langue Française volume. In the present article, we focus entirely on commitment. The term is widely used in at least three major areas of linguistic enquiry:1 studies on illocutionary acts, studies on modality and evidentiality, and the formal modelling of dialogue/argumentation. In spite of its frequent use, the notion has rarely been theorised and has never been the subject of a monograph or a specialised reader. In keeping with this is the fact that none of the many dictionaries and encyclopaedias of linguistics or philosophy that we have consulted devotes a separate entry to it. Section 1 of this introduction briefly reviews what commitment means in the three fields just mentioned. Now and then, with respect to a particular issue, pointers are given to which articles in this collection have something to say about the issue. In section 2, we take a lexical and syntactic look at the ways in which the contributors to the present volume use the term. In section 3, we outline each of the contributions, with a focus on the role that commitment plays in them.

Uncertain Words, Uncertain Texts. Perception and Effects of Uncertainty in Biomedical Communication

“…In the sociolinguistic perspective, Jaffe (2009, 3) defines stancetaking as "taking up a position with respect to the form or the content of one's utterance". Beside the "affective" stance, related to the emotions expressed towards the ongoing object of discourse, the "epistemic" stance is defined as the speaker's attitude towards the reliability of conveyed information (Dendale and Tasmowski 2001); commitment to the truth of the message (De Brabanter and Dendale, 2008); its degree of certainty, i.e. likelihood of the proposition (Castelfranchi & Poggi, 1998); certainty or uncertainty of the information being communicated (Zuczkowski et al, 2017).…”

Thinking out loud: A discourse analysis of ‘thinking’ during talk radio interactions

“…He likens the function of such verbs to stage-directions, which serve to 'help the understanding and assessment of what is said rather than being a part of what is said' (p. 496). Urmson's (1952) observation has developed into the key linguistic principle of commitment, in which the speaker makes a public display of an attitude towards their utterance (De Brabanter and Dendale 2008) and which is commonly taken to be gradable (e.g. Palmer 1986;Toulmin 1958;Vanderveken 1990).…”

A truth that’s told with bad intent

“…(1) Commitment: Let us start with the notion of 'commitment:' As pointed out by De Brabanter & Dendale (2008), there are several notions of commitment on the market; with respect to speech-act taxonomy, Harnish (2005) compares the approaches by Searle (1969), Alston (2000), and Bach & Harnish (1979). Harnish (2005: 12) draws a distinction between "more or less ' Austinian' approaches, which rely on rules and/or conventions" (including Searle 1969, 1979and Alston 2000 and "more or less 'Gricean' approaches, which rely on propositional attitudes" (including Bach & Harnish 1979, albeit the latter actually are "a mixed case, " as Fn.…”