| Speaker | Paul Portner |
| Affiliaton(s) | Georgetown University |
| Date | 18.02.2022 |
| Time | 16:00 o'clock |
| Venue | Online (see below) |
| Link to SPAGAD Lecture Series |
Commentator: Magdalena Kaufmann, University of Connecticut, Storrs
So-called speech act adverbs like frankly, seriously, and truthfully have been taken as arguments in favor of a grammatical representation of illocutionary force (e.g. Sadock 1974, Bach and Harnish 1979, Krifka 2021, a.o.). This view of force contrasts with the dynamic pragmatics approach, where force is assigned on the basis of content (Portner 2004). I suggest that frankly pertains more to the social relation between conversational participants. As such, it is to be understood in terms of allocutivity, the grammatical marking of the author-addressee relation, rather than speech acts. The talk also considers the role of the author-addressee relation in the pragmatics of imperatives and in explaining the appropriateness of assertions and questions in context. Based on this discussion, I consider the idea that force is determined on the basis of the author-addressee relation encoded in the way made overt by allocutivity, so that there is less reason to assume the encoding of force in grammar than many scholars assume.
Link: https://hu-berlin.zoom.us/j/65658112731?pwd=dE5hQUNEMHd5NXFmSUtFNkoxeUJEdz09
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