Bibliography of Pragmatics Online: 12th Release, updated and expanded

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Performatives and (im)perfective aspect

Michael Meeuwis, Astrid De Wit & Frank Brisard Performatives and (im)perfective aspect (lecture) This paper represents the first (methodological) step in a cross-linguistic study on the relation between performativity and aspect. It starts from the observation that verbs, when used as performatives, are typically inflected with (present) perfective aspect. This can be motivated on the basis of the indexical quality of performatively used verbs: the activity referred to by performatives (such as I promise to come) can be said to coincide exactly with the act of referring to it. Thus, we may say that the denoted situation (the speech act of promising) is in fact constituted by the speech event (Langacker 2001). As a result, the situation at issue is fully conceptualized at the time of speaking by definition, which would typically trigger perfective aspectual marking: perfective expressions designate situations that are treated as known and closed. Imperfective aspect, in contrast, is associated with construing situations as incomplete and open. For instance, using progressive marking (a kind of imperfective aspect) in an utterance like I’m promising to come has the effect of turning it into a mere description of an ongoing event, thereby canceling its performative character. It is possible, however, that this assumption of a correlation between performativity and perfectivity is biased by a privileging of examples from English, in which performative contexts obligatorily feature the simple present (and the simple present is commonly assumed to have a perfective value; cf. Brinton (1988), Smith (1997: 110-112, 185-186), Williams (2002: 128-166) and De Wit et al. (2013)). However, data from Slavic -- the only language family for which the relation between performativity and aspect has been examined thoroughly (cf. Israeli 2001; Dickey forthcoming) -- indicate an opposite tendency: most Slavic languages, especially from the eastern branch (such as Russian), almost exclusively allow imperfective verbs in performative contexts. Jaggar (2006) furthermore indicates that performative expressions in Hausa trigger both perfective and imperfective marking. The correlation therefore needs to be checked cross-linguistically, an endeavor that requires a suitable questionnaire offering contexts that are universally accepted as triggering performative uses. Our purpose is to present such a questionnaire and to discuss its methodological potential and limitations. A crucial element will be to elicit and identify performatives without having to resort to aspectual tests, such as in English (present simple vs progressive). By wayof a pilot study, we will also offer our first findings based on native speaker elicitations in Lingala, Turkish and Sranan

Performativity, progressive avoidance and aspect

Unlike other reports of ongoing actions, English explicit performatives do not normally take progressive form. This suggests that “there is something over and above a mere concurrent report” in utterances like I bet you I’ll win the race that is absent in utterances like I’m betting you I’ll win the race (Levinson 1983: 259). For Krifka (2014), an explicit performative describes not the utterance act being produced, but the adoption of a new commitment, which has already happened at encoding time. If this is so, however, we might expect to find preterit- or present-perfect-form performative clauses and it appears that we do not. Using cross-linguistic data from genetically and geographically unrelated languages, we establish a strong typological tendency: explicit performative utterances use the same verbal construction that is used for reporting states holding at coding time. We attribute this tendency to an epistemic commonality between explicit performatives and state reports. In addition, we offer an explanation for exceptional uses of progressive aspect in apparently performative expressions, noted by, e.g., Searle (1989). Building on Dahl (1985), we have developed a questionnaire that allows us to identify the aspectual distinctions made in individual languages and which of these categories are employed in the various performative contexts (as classified by Searle 1976). Imperfective aspect is used to encode performatives and present-time states in, e.g., Arabic, Turkish and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. In Bantu languages like Lingala and Kirundi, performative predications receive perfective encoding, and this same form is used to report states holding at present. Japanese and the Austronesian language Kilivila feature unmarked verb forms in both present state reports and performative expressions. Progressive aspect is systematically excluded in the languages of our sample. Thus, in light of these typological observations, the use of the English simple present in performative contexts is not unexpected. The fact that present-time states and performative events receive the same aspectual construal across languages suggests a semantic commonality that cannot be conceived in terms of boundedness, one of the major parameters used to describe aspectual distinctions. We argue instead that aspectual categories encode epistemic distinctions, and that states and performative events are similar at this epistemic level: the situation type expressed by a performative or state predication is verifiable at the time of speaking. States have the subinterval property, according to which every segment of a state counts as an instance of that state, including that segment that overlaps the speech event. In the case of performatives, the reporting event and the performed event (promising, etc.) are one and the same; therefore, performative events are verifiable as such at speech time. The few scholars who touch on performativity and aspect in English appear to assume that in the rare attestations of progressive perfomatives, the predication does not perform a speech act (like promising) but rather reports on one’s own performance, as in I’m not just saying, I’m promising (Langacker 1987; Verschueren 1995; Krifka 2014). However, this characterization is not evidently applicable to examples like I’m warning you, Mrs. Hinkle: one more obscenity and I’ll charge you with contempt, which does count as a warning. Analysis of COCA data reveals that one type of performative clause, the exercitive type (Austin 1962), involving verbs such as warn and order, accounts for the majority of progressive performative tokens. Following McGowan (2004), we assume that exercitive acts change the boundaries of permissible or appropriate conduct. We postulate that progressive-form exercitive acts do not change these boundaries but rather describe an effort to do so. More generally, progressive performatives are action glosses like I’m trying to repair this; they explain the purpose of ongoing actions, both linguistic and nonlinguistic. This account naturally extends to non-exercitive progressive performatives like I’m withdrawing as a candidate

METAFORE SU DOGAĐAJI, A NE PREDMETI

This paper discusses the tension that exists between linguistic and psychological approaches to metaphor. It aims to demonstrate that interdisciplinary efforts are probably not all of equal value when it comes to serving the ends of any individual discipline. In the case of psychological research on metaphor, such interdisciplinarity may in fact be limited to a heuristic relation, in which linguistics offers useful constraints in defining an object of study that should allow psycholinguists to pursue their own general goal of mapping the architecture of the language processor. Thus, it may well be that the existing division of labor, between linguistics and psycholinguistics, that holds for the study of metaphor is a principled, instead of a merely contingent, reality. The paper’s argumentation for this starts from the observation that the psycholinguistic study of meaning phenomena in natural language is being increasingly marked by a quasi-exclusive focus on properties of the brain, as the seat of the mental lexicon, and not on the interpreter holding that brain. I concentrate on methodological difficulties conjured up by the “heteronomic” aspect of metaphor understanding, as well as on theoretical problems with defining metaphor as an object of study in diverging disciplines.U članku se raspravlja o sukobu lingvističkog i psihološkog pristupa metafori. Cilj je pokazati da svi interdisciplinarni napori ne donose jednaku korist gledaju li se ciljevi pojedinih disciplina. U slučaju psihološkog istraživanja metafore interdisciplinarnost se zapravo svodi na heuristički odnos, tj. lingvist ustanovljava parametre korisne pri definiranju predmeta proučavanja te tako omogućuje psiholingvistu da se približi svom općenitom cilju, proučavanju arhitekture jezičnog procesora. Iz toga slijedi da je postojeća podjela rada između lingvistike i psiholingvistike nužna realnost, a ne slučajnost. U prilogu se u argumentaciji polazi od opažanja da proučavanje semantičkih aspekata prirodnih jezika sve više i više karakterizira navodno sužavanje pažnje isključivo na osobine mozga kao sjedišta mentalnog leksikona, te tako isključuje interpretativnu moć jedinke u čijem je sklopu taj mozak. Posebna se pažnja posvećuje metodološkim problemima do koji dovodi heteronomni aspekt razumijevanja metafore, kao i teoretskim problemima pri definiciji metafore kao predmeta proučavanja u divergentnim disciplinama

Aspects of Linguistic Variation

This volume brings together papers on linguistic variation. It takes a broad perspective, covering not only crosslinguistic and diachronic but also intralinguistic and interspeaker variation, and examines phenomena ranging from negation and TAM over connectives and the lexicon to definite articles and comparative concepts in well- and lesser-known languages. The collection thus contributes to our understanding of variation in general

L’imparfait marqueur de réalité virtuelle

L’objectif de cet article est de présenter une approche de l’imparfait dans le cadre de la grammaire cognitive de Langacker. Nous défendrons l’idée que l’imparfait doit être défini comme un temps qui présente la situation désignée comme une « réalité virtuelle », c’est-à-dire comme conçue par un centre de conceptualisation autre que le locuteur actuel. Pour ce faire, nous montrerons d’abord que dans les emplois temporels de l’imparfait, ce n’est pas seulement la situation désignée qui est située dans le passé, mais aussi le centre de conceptualisation à partir duquel la situation est conçue. Nous nous intéresserons ensuite aux emplois non temporels et modaux, afin de montrer que leur analyse nécessite une conception non temporelle du sens de base de l’imparfait, telle qu’elle a été définie ci-dessus. L’emploi temporel sera alors défini comme l’emploi prototypique de l’imparfait.This article aims to present an approach of the French imparfait within the framework of Langacker’s cognitive grammar. We show that the imparfait is best defined as a tense that presents the designated situation as a “virtual reality”, i. e., as situated with respect to a centre of conceptualisation, or a second ground, different from the actual speaker. Firstly, we show that in the temporal uses of the imparfait, it is not only the designated situation that is to be located in the past, but also the centre of conceptualisation from which the situation is being conceived. We then look into the nontemporal and modal uses. In our view their analysis shows the need for a nontemporal conception of the basic meaning of the imparfait, as a tense expressing virtuality, with the past-time meaning as its prototypical value

L’imparfait marqueur de réalité virtuelle

L’objectif de cet article est de présenter une approche de l’imparfait dans le cadre de la grammaire cognitive de Langacker. Nous défendrons l’idée que l’imparfait doit être défini comme un temps qui présente la situation désignée comme une « réalité virtuelle », c’est-à-dire comme conçue par un centre de conceptualisation autre que le locuteur actuel. Pour ce faire, nous montrerons d’abord que dans les emplois temporels de l’imparfait, ce n’est pas seulement la situation désignée qui est située dans le passé, mais aussi le centre de conceptualisation à partir duquel la situation est conçue. Nous nous intéresserons ensuite aux emplois non temporels et modaux, afin de montrer que leur analyse nécessite une conception non temporelle du sens de base de l’imparfait, telle qu’elle a été définie ci-dessus. L’emploi temporel sera alors défini comme l’emploi prototypique de l’imparfait.This article aims to present an approach of the French imparfait within the framework of Langacker’s cognitive grammar. We show that the imparfait is best defined as a tense that presents the designated situation as a “virtual reality”, i. e., as situated with respect to a centre of conceptualisation, or a second ground, different from the actual speaker. Firstly, we show that in the temporal uses of the imparfait, it is not only the designated situation that is to be located in the past, but also the centre of conceptualisation from which the situation is being conceived. We then look into the nontemporal and modal uses. In our view their analysis shows the need for a nontemporal conception of the basic meaning of the imparfait, as a tense expressing virtuality, with the past-time meaning as its prototypical value