Performatives in a rationally based speech act theory

  • Authors:
  • Philip R. Cohen;Hector J. Levesque

  • Affiliations:
  • Center for the Study of Language and Information, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA;University of Toronto

  • Venue:
  • ACL '90 Proceedings of the 28th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
  • Year:
  • 1990

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Abstract

A crucially important adequacy test of any theory of speech acts is its ability to handle performatives. This paper provides a theory of performatives as a test case for our rationally based theory of illocutionary acts. We show why "I request you..." is a request, and "I lie to you that p" is self-defeating. The analysis supports and extends earlier work of theorists such as Bach and Harnish [1] and takes issue with recent claims by Searle [10] that such performative-as-declarative analyses are doomed to failure.