SPAGAD Lecture Series: Verbal Signaling: Parentheticals, Evidentials, and Some Self-Ascriptions

Comment:                  Bart Geurts, Radboud University, Nijmegen

Link to YouTube-Video of the talk­

Abstract

It is widely accepted that in performing a speech act such as an assertion or a promise, a speaker undertakes a commitment. This notion of commitment exhibits multiple dimensions, and in disentangling them we can discern proto-illocutionary acts that exhibit some but not all of the dimensions of commitment we find with acts such as assertion. Some of these proto-acts can help shed light on the force, such as it may be, with which we indicate the epistemic status of what we assert or otherwise illocute. I will take parentheticals (such as ‘…, as I claim’), grammatical evidentials, and self-ascriptions of force (such as ‘I claim that…’) as cases whose behavior is illuminated with the concept of verbal signaling. This study is part of a larger project viewing speech acts through the lens of cultural evolution, and I will close with brief discussion of that project.

Link: hu-berlin.zoom.us/j/65658112731

Zoom Meeting-ID: 656 5811 2731

Password: Please contact Christin Walch, walch@leibniz-zas.de