Linguistics Seminar Talk - Jessica Rett

Title:  Event polysemy and the illocutionary/descriptive distinction

Abstract: 

There are at least two semantic distinctions made in the literature: the (not-)at-issue distinction, and the distinction between descriptive and illocutionary or use-conditional content (Kaplan 1997; Horn 2013; Rett 2021b). Two phenomena that have traditionally been characterized as illocutionary are illocutionary mood and illocutionary modifiers (e.g. frankly). Most treatments of not-at-issue content don’t differentiate between illocutionary content and descriptive not-at-issue content, like that encoded in appositives or conventional implicature. Those that do can’t model both illocutionary mood and illocutionary modifiers, or require additional formal apparatuses to do so. The goal of this paper is to present a unified and natural account of illocutionary content. I argue that all illocutionary content has in common that it is discourse-anaphoric to the speech event. As a result, we can model all of these types of content as (different kinds of) Common Ground update, in the Stalnakarian sense. I provide a formal account of this model, and argue that it makes certain novel and correct predictions about how encoders of illocutionary content behave, and how they’re encoded.