Margareta Brandt

Die performativen Äußerungen – eine empirische Studie

A sentence like Ich bitte dich, ihn morgen zu besuchen may be used as an assertion about the act of asking. As a rule, however, it is used just to perform the act of asking, i.e. as a performative utterance. I t is the aim of this paper to list and discuss relevant empirical data about performative utterances that may help to decide between the following hypotheses: A performative utterance is (a) semantically ambiguous and pragmatically bifunctional, (b) semantically unambiguous and pragmatically monofunctional or (c) semantically unambiguous and pragmatically bifunctional. In the first section of the paper the formal properties of performative utterances are described. In the following sections it is discussed if and when modal particles, modal verbs, sentential adverbs, stress and negation block the performative use of a sentence like (1). I t is further discussed whether it is possible to embed a performative utterance and whether there are performative utterances which do not have the status of a sentence.