Levels of Linguistic Acts and the Semantics of Saying and Quoting

Abstract

IntroductionIn How to Do Things with Words, Austin (1962) introduced not only the notion of an illocutionary act, such as an act of asserting, requesting, promising, or asking a question, but also the notion of a locutionary act, which consists in various acts 'below' the level of an illocutionary act. A locutionary act includes what Austin calls a 'rhetic act', an act characterized, roughly, as the act of uttering the words in the sentence with a specific meaning and reference. A locutionary act also includes a 'phatic act', an act of uttering words, and a phonetic act, an act of producing sounds. This paper will outline a novel semantics of verbs of saying and of quotation based on Austin's distinction among levels of linguistic acts. Austin's notion of a rhetic act is not a very clear one and tends to be considered problematic and insufficiently motivated. This paper will propose a particular way of understanding the notion of a rhetic act and argue that it is extremely well-reflected in the semantics of natural language, in particular in the semantics of verbs of saying and certain sorts of plural NPs in English (and German). The paper will furthermore outline a novel semantics of quotation making crucial use of Austin's distinction among lower-level linguistic acts, a semantics that promises a unified and compositional semantics of quotation. Two ideas guide that semantics. First, quotations convey properties related to lower-level linguistic acts, Austin's phonetic or phatic acts; second, such meanings of quotations are strictly based on syntactic structure, namely a lowerlevel linguistic structure as part of the syntactic structure of the sentence that is input to interpretation. Such lower-level linguistic structures may be phonetic, phonological or morpho-syntactic structures. They will be interpreted, roughly, as properties of utterance An attitude report such as (1a) on that view has the logical form in (1b), where claim takes as its implicit Davidsonian event argument an act of claiming and product is a function mapping that act onto its product, John's claim:(1) a. John claims that Mary is happy. b. e(claim(e, John) & [that Mary is happy](product(e)))The semantic value of the that-clause, [that Mary is happy], is a property of attitudinal objects, specifying their satisfaction conditions. Crucially, speech act reports such as (2a) with a quotational complement will have the very same logical form, as in (2b): (2) a. John says 'Mary is happy'. However, the event argument of say is just a locutionary, not an illocutionary act, and the semantic value of the quotational complement, ['Mary is happy'], is a property of locutionary products, specifying, roughly, their form and semantic composition.The form-related property that the direct quote in (2a) conveys is based strictly on linguistic structure, understood roughly in terms of Generative Syntax. The idea is that quotation involves a lower-level linguistic structure (a phonetic, phonological, or morpho-syntactic structure) as part of the syntactic s...

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