My target article outlines a pragmatic theory centred on the notion of commitment, which I believe is simpler and more general than what has been on offer so far. First, I argue that commitments are involved in a wider variety of utterances than are covered by alternative accounts, and are also the basis for turn-taking (question–answer, greeting–greeting, and so on). Second, the theory features a new analysis of common ground in terms of commitment sharing, which not only accommodates assertions and presuppositions, but affords a general account of how the common ground is changed by speech acts and the responses they elicit from their addressees. Third, the theory includes and extends the Gricean theory of cooperative communication, which also accounts for the sincerity inferences associated with various speech act types. Last, the theory shows how we can get much of our communicative business done without attributing mental states to each other, thus paving the way for a better understanding of the phylogeny and ontogeny of human communication. These are the main ideas, and I am pleasantly surprised to see that the critical responses to my article are, on the whole, constructive and supportive. At the same time, I find it oddly reassuring that there is a small but vocal minority representing the intentionalist establishment, who find no merit in my theory whatsoever, and are out for the kill. As Nietzsche used to say, what does not kill you makes you stronger. In the following, I will address a fair number of the issues raised bymy critics, but first I would like to clarify my project by mentioning some of the objectives I was not trying to achieve. To beginwith, it was notmy purpose to provide, defend, or criticize any taxonomy of speech acts, or analyse in detail any type of speech act; nor did I want even to suggest, let alone argue, that an industrial strength theory of speech acts can be built from commitments alone. If there are gaps in my theory (and there are many), I will first try to fill them with such conceptual
{"title":"Commitments continued","authors":"B. Geurts","doi":"10.1515/tl-2019-0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2019-0009","url":null,"abstract":"My target article outlines a pragmatic theory centred on the notion of commitment, which I believe is simpler and more general than what has been on offer so far. First, I argue that commitments are involved in a wider variety of utterances than are covered by alternative accounts, and are also the basis for turn-taking (question–answer, greeting–greeting, and so on). Second, the theory features a new analysis of common ground in terms of commitment sharing, which not only accommodates assertions and presuppositions, but affords a general account of how the common ground is changed by speech acts and the responses they elicit from their addressees. Third, the theory includes and extends the Gricean theory of cooperative communication, which also accounts for the sincerity inferences associated with various speech act types. Last, the theory shows how we can get much of our communicative business done without attributing mental states to each other, thus paving the way for a better understanding of the phylogeny and ontogeny of human communication. These are the main ideas, and I am pleasantly surprised to see that the critical responses to my article are, on the whole, constructive and supportive. At the same time, I find it oddly reassuring that there is a small but vocal minority representing the intentionalist establishment, who find no merit in my theory whatsoever, and are out for the kill. As Nietzsche used to say, what does not kill you makes you stronger. In the following, I will address a fair number of the issues raised bymy critics, but first I would like to clarify my project by mentioning some of the objectives I was not trying to achieve. To beginwith, it was notmy purpose to provide, defend, or criticize any taxonomy of speech acts, or analyse in detail any type of speech act; nor did I want even to suggest, let alone argue, that an industrial strength theory of speech acts can be built from commitments alone. If there are gaps in my theory (and there are many), I will first try to fill them with such conceptual","PeriodicalId":46148,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical Linguistics","volume":"45 1","pages":"111 - 125"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2019-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/tl-2019-0009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46814141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We have to be grateful to Bart Geurts (BG henceforth) for his intriguing study on the effects of running through an interesting option in the theory of linguistic communication: Casting the concept of commitment as the principal character in order to explore the amount of “explanatory mileage” (BG p. 2) a commitment-based account provides. And I am grateful for being offered the opportunity to spell out the reasons for remaining skeptical about the trend BG’s paper is a characteristic example of. The concept of commitment has become fashionable recently not only in linguistics and philosophy of language, but also in business and politics: Google Books Ngram Viewer shows an almost fifty percent increase of the use of the English term in German books from 1998 to 2008. But what is its proper place in a theory of linguistic communication that covers the very notion of speech act as well as common ground management, linguistic conventions and conversational implicatures? BG’s thesis is clear: Social commitments belong “in the driver’s seat” of such a theory, whereas “mental states retain a very respectable position in the back seat” (p. 28). He continues: “and it could hardly be otherwise”, and this is certainly correct because he means the indispensability of mental states, and not the leading role of commitments. Regarding the latter such a claim would be much less uncontroversial. I will argue that it could and should well be otherwise and that mental states don’t belong in the back seat. While I wholeheartedly agree with BG’s postulate that “a theory of communication should bring together the social and mentalist perspectives in a way that is significantly more enlightening than the mere acknowledgement that these two perspectives exist,” I disagree on the way his proposal specifies this integration of perspectives, namely by what I would like to call overcommitting to commitments. Instead I
{"title":"How to avoid overcommitment: Communication as thought sharing (with consequences)","authors":"D. Zaefferer","doi":"10.1515/tl-2019-0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2019-0008","url":null,"abstract":"We have to be grateful to Bart Geurts (BG henceforth) for his intriguing study on the effects of running through an interesting option in the theory of linguistic communication: Casting the concept of commitment as the principal character in order to explore the amount of “explanatory mileage” (BG p. 2) a commitment-based account provides. And I am grateful for being offered the opportunity to spell out the reasons for remaining skeptical about the trend BG’s paper is a characteristic example of. The concept of commitment has become fashionable recently not only in linguistics and philosophy of language, but also in business and politics: Google Books Ngram Viewer shows an almost fifty percent increase of the use of the English term in German books from 1998 to 2008. But what is its proper place in a theory of linguistic communication that covers the very notion of speech act as well as common ground management, linguistic conventions and conversational implicatures? BG’s thesis is clear: Social commitments belong “in the driver’s seat” of such a theory, whereas “mental states retain a very respectable position in the back seat” (p. 28). He continues: “and it could hardly be otherwise”, and this is certainly correct because he means the indispensability of mental states, and not the leading role of commitments. Regarding the latter such a claim would be much less uncontroversial. I will argue that it could and should well be otherwise and that mental states don’t belong in the back seat. While I wholeheartedly agree with BG’s postulate that “a theory of communication should bring together the social and mentalist perspectives in a way that is significantly more enlightening than the mere acknowledgement that these two perspectives exist,” I disagree on the way his proposal specifies this integration of perspectives, namely by what I would like to call overcommitting to commitments. Instead I","PeriodicalId":46148,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical Linguistics","volume":"45 1","pages":"99 - 110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2019-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/tl-2019-0008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47915236","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
I much enjoyed reading this paper: it is admirably lucid, and I am generally in sympathy with the author’s programme of treating communication as a vehicle for action coordination via social commitments. In what follows I offer some suggestions as to how the analysis could be elaborated, as well as indicating some points where I am not quite convinced by the author’s proposals, however much I might like to be.
{"title":"Some questions about the notion of “commitment”","authors":"R. Kibble","doi":"10.1515/tl-2019-0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2019-0005","url":null,"abstract":"I much enjoyed reading this paper: it is admirably lucid, and I am generally in sympathy with the author’s programme of treating communication as a vehicle for action coordination via social commitments. In what follows I offer some suggestions as to how the analysis could be elaborated, as well as indicating some points where I am not quite convinced by the author’s proposals, however much I might like to be.","PeriodicalId":46148,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical Linguistics","volume":"45 1","pages":"69 - 72"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2019-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/tl-2019-0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44548244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
What is a speech act, and what makes it count as one kind of speech act rather than another? In the target article, Geurts considers two ways of answering these questions.1 His opponent is intentionalism—the view that performing a speech act is a matter of acting with a communicative intention, and that speech acts of different kinds involve intentions to affect hearers in different ways. Geurts offers several objections to intentionalism. Instead, he articulates and defends an admirably clear and resolute version of the view that performing a speech act is a matter of undertaking a social commitment. Different kinds of speech acts, on his view, involve social commitments of different kinds. My aim is to respond to Geurts on behalf of intentionalism. I’ll argue that his objections aren’t all that worrying (Section 3), that Geurts’ view suffers from some quite serious problems that intentionalists don’t face (Section 4), and that intentionalists can give a principled account of the ways that speech acts give rise to commitments (Section 5). First I will spell out the two opposing views (Sections 1–2).
{"title":"Intention and commitment in speech acts","authors":"Daniel W. Harris","doi":"10.1515/tl-2019-0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2019-0004","url":null,"abstract":"What is a speech act, and what makes it count as one kind of speech act rather than another? In the target article, Geurts considers two ways of answering these questions.1 His opponent is intentionalism—the view that performing a speech act is a matter of acting with a communicative intention, and that speech acts of different kinds involve intentions to affect hearers in different ways. Geurts offers several objections to intentionalism. Instead, he articulates and defends an admirably clear and resolute version of the view that performing a speech act is a matter of undertaking a social commitment. Different kinds of speech acts, on his view, involve social commitments of different kinds. My aim is to respond to Geurts on behalf of intentionalism. I’ll argue that his objections aren’t all that worrying (Section 3), that Geurts’ view suffers from some quite serious problems that intentionalists don’t face (Section 4), and that intentionalists can give a principled account of the ways that speech acts give rise to commitments (Section 5). First I will spell out the two opposing views (Sections 1–2).","PeriodicalId":46148,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical Linguistics","volume":"45 1","pages":"53 - 67"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2019-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/tl-2019-0004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43934041","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The main tenet of this paper is that human communication is first and foremost a matter of negotiating commitments, rather than one of conveying intentions, beliefs, and other mental states. Every speech act causes the speaker to become committed to the hearer to act on a propositional content. Hence, commitments are relations between speakers, hearers, and propositions. Their purpose is to enable speakers and hearers to coordinate their actions: communication is coordinated action for action coordination. To illustrate the potential of the approach, commitment-based analyses are offered for a representative sample of speech act types, conversational implicatures, as well as for common ground.
{"title":"Communication as commitment sharing: speech acts, implicatures, common ground","authors":"B. Geurts","doi":"10.1515/tl-2019-0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2019-0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The main tenet of this paper is that human communication is first and foremost a matter of negotiating commitments, rather than one of conveying intentions, beliefs, and other mental states. Every speech act causes the speaker to become committed to the hearer to act on a propositional content. Hence, commitments are relations between speakers, hearers, and propositions. Their purpose is to enable speakers and hearers to coordinate their actions: communication is coordinated action for action coordination. To illustrate the potential of the approach, commitment-based analyses are offered for a representative sample of speech act types, conversational implicatures, as well as for common ground.","PeriodicalId":46148,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical Linguistics","volume":"45 1","pages":"1 - 30"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2019-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/tl-2019-0001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47706684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
From the point of view of cognitive development, the present paper by Bart Geurts is highly relevant, welcome and timely. It speaks to a fundamental puzzle in developmental pragmatics that used to be seen as such, then was considered to be resolved by many researchers, but may return nowadays with its full puzzling force. The puzzle in question is the following: on broadly Gricean accounts, how should young children ever be able to start communicating, given that even basic conversation requires heavy cognitive machinery of recursive higher-order mindreading, and given that young children appear not to be such higher-order mindreaders yet? (Which, in fact, as much research suggests, they may actually become over development as a consequence rather than as a precursor of language acquisition.) This puzzle has been most clearly described by Richard Breheny in 2006 in the form of a trilemma (Breheny 2006): (i) Verbal communication requires higher-order intentionality (that is, a propositional attitude “Theory of Mind” – as it is often called in developmental psychology – that involves concepts of belief, etc.) (ii) Young children before age 4 do not yet have such a Theory of Mind; yet (iii) Young children clearly do engage in verbal communication.
{"title":"Commitment sharing as crucial step toward a developmentally plausible speech act theory?","authors":"H. Rakoczy, Tanya Behne","doi":"10.1515/tl-2019-0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2019-0007","url":null,"abstract":"From the point of view of cognitive development, the present paper by Bart Geurts is highly relevant, welcome and timely. It speaks to a fundamental puzzle in developmental pragmatics that used to be seen as such, then was considered to be resolved by many researchers, but may return nowadays with its full puzzling force. The puzzle in question is the following: on broadly Gricean accounts, how should young children ever be able to start communicating, given that even basic conversation requires heavy cognitive machinery of recursive higher-order mindreading, and given that young children appear not to be such higher-order mindreaders yet? (Which, in fact, as much research suggests, they may actually become over development as a consequence rather than as a precursor of language acquisition.) This puzzle has been most clearly described by Richard Breheny in 2006 in the form of a trilemma (Breheny 2006): (i) Verbal communication requires higher-order intentionality (that is, a propositional attitude “Theory of Mind” – as it is often called in developmental psychology – that involves concepts of belief, etc.) (ii) Young children before age 4 do not yet have such a Theory of Mind; yet (iii) Young children clearly do engage in verbal communication.","PeriodicalId":46148,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical Linguistics","volume":"45 1","pages":"93 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2019-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/tl-2019-0007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46561893","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The research in this paper was partly made possible thanks to the grants awarded to the author by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and FEDER Funds (FFI2015-68 594-P), by the Government of the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017 SGR 1478) and by the European Commission (SIGN-HUB H2020 project 693 349).
{"title":"On categorizing types of role shift in Sign languages","authors":"J. Quer","doi":"10.1515/tl-2018-0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2018-0020","url":null,"abstract":"The research in this paper was partly made possible thanks to the grants awarded to the author by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and FEDER Funds (FFI2015-68 594-P), by the Government of the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017 SGR 1478) and by the European Commission (SIGN-HUB H2020 project 693 349).","PeriodicalId":46148,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical Linguistics","volume":"44 1","pages":"277 - 282"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2018-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/tl-2018-0020","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46404837","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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