Manfred Bierwisch

Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics

Semantic Structure and Illocutionary Force.- Perlocutions.- Pragmatic Entailment and Questions.- Surface Compositionality and the Semantics of Mood.- Yes-No Questions as Wh-Questions.- Syntactic Meanings.- Situational Context and Illocutionary Force.- Semantics and Pragmatics of Sentence Connectives in Natural Language.- Some Remarks on Explicit Performatives, Indirect Speech Acts, Locutionary Meaning and Truth-Value.- The Background of Meaning.- Towards a Pragmatically Based Theory of Meaning.- Illocutionary Logic and Self-Defeating Speech Acts.- Telling the Facts.- Methodological Remarks on Speech Act Theory.- Index of Names.- Index of Subjects.

Semantic Structure and Illocutionary Force

It is by now commonplace that an utterance of (1) can be taken under appropriate conditions e.g., as a promise, a prediction, a warning, or a remark on the speaker’s and the addressee’s dispositions.

Two critical problems in accent rules

Beginning with the paper of Chomsky, Halle & Lukoff (1956) a theory of accent has been developed which attempts to explain by certain fairly simple rules the complex pattern of degrees of prominence assigned to any given sentence. In the present paper I will not be concerned with those rules which specify the main stress for stems (or, more precisely, for words containing only one stem), but only with the rules which introduce degrees of prominence in compound words and phrases. Let me call these latter rules Phrase-Accent-rules, or for short, PA-rules. The general conditions on the form and the manner of operation of PA-rules may be stated as follows: (i) PA-rules apply cyclically, beginning with the innermost, or lowest constituents of given final derived phrase markers, proceeding ‘upward’ until the topmost constituent is reached. (ii) PA-rules pick out one of the several primary accents of a constituent to which they apply, and make it the main accent of that constituent, thereby lowering all other accents by one degree. (iii) Formally, PA-rules are strictly local transformations whose structural descriptions recognize only three factors: first, the constituents, or bracketing, of a sentence; second, the categorization of the constituents; and third, the previously assigned accents.

Remarks on Definitions in Natural Language

At first glance the problem of definitions in natural language seems to be a more or less marginal question. This is, however, far from being true. While discussing definitions we shall be forced to touch upon some fairly intricate and central problems of linguistic theory. Though even the formal properties of definitional sentences are far from being clear, the more difficult problems arise with respect to their semantic interpretation, their role in introducing new terms into a given language, and their relation to non-definitional generic sentences. Questions of this type may shed new light on certain properties of lexical readings and lexical systems of natural languages in general and on the relation between analytic and empirical generic sentences based on these properties in particular. We cannot answer these questions within the limits of the present article. We only intend to explore some hitherto poorly considered problems of linguistic theory and to stipulate some concepts that might be useful for further and more detailed investigations.

Social Differentiation of Language Structure

It is an empirical fact that in a speech community generally several varieties of language, or even different languages, are used. Furthermore, native speakers are very well aware of the difference between such varieties and of the effects these differences may have in communication. It is not at all obvious, however, how such varieties are to be delimited, how they function in producing the effects in question, and what the nature of these effects is. There are several branches of linguistic research dealing with one or another aspect of the indicated problems: dialectology, stylistics, and sociolinguistics are the more obvious ones.

Utterance Meaning and Mental States

Publisher Summary This chapter reconciles the more or less elaborate approaches in linguistics and intensional logic to deal with the formal aspect of verbal utterance type of mental operation. A simple example is described in the chapter to clarify the notion of utterance meaning, which is to be distinguished from the semantic structure of a sentence. One type of differences depends on the time and the addressee of an utterance—that is, on the interpretation of the “deictic elements” “you,” “your,” and “will.” This type of context dependent variation in the utterance meaning is fairly obvious and is widely discussed both in linguistics and logic. The crucial point of the initial considerations is that assigning a linguistic structure to an inscription does not yet determine the pertinent utterance meaning. The chapter also describes the model-theoretic semantics and intensional logic. The distinction between semantic structure and utterance meaning to the Fregean distinction between “Sinn” and “Bedeutung,” taken up by Carnap in terms of intension and extension are connected.

Generative Grammar and European Linguistics

The development of the theory of generative grammar during the past fifteen years has led not only to considerable improvements in successive stages, but also to alternative proposals with respect to certain problems of theoretical interest. This concerns in particular the relation between syntax and semantics, where at present at least three different approaches are under lively discussion. None of these alternatives, investigating different possibilities within the general framework of generative transformational grammar, can be taken, however, as representing a separate ‘school’. It is also impossible to localize them in any geographical sense. They are simply detailed explorations of alternative hypotheses necessary for an empirically motivated clarification and extension of the theory under discussion. This leads to certain difficulties in the delimitation of the subject matter for the present chapter. Although since the early sixties an increasing number of linguists in Europe have been attracted by the theory of generative grammar, they do not form in any serious sense a particular trend or school or anything of this kind that could be contrasted to corresponding research done elsewhere in the world. Hence the heading Generative Grammar in Western Europe does not specify a coherent and selfcontained topic. It would thus be a rather extrinsic approach to the subject of the present paper, if I simply tried to report on some European contributions to research based on the principles of generative grammar.