Linguistics Seminar Talk - David Beaver of University of Texas Austin

Title: Conditional Acts 

Abstract: 

Fifty years ago, the philosopher Ralph Walker posed the question, “How can one perform a speech act in a conditional way, any more than one can stand on one’s head in a conditional way?” Though intended rhetorically, I will suggest that we must take this literally. I will discuss a wide range of putative cases of speech acts that are conditionalized, and even counterfactually conditionalized, as well as conjoined and disjoined. Among these are clear cases that cannot be, as I will put it, “unwound” into non-conditionalized variants. These examples challenge the standard pipeline model, in which semantics precedes force. Instead, I argue that the production and interpretation of semantics and force are fundamentally interwoven. That is, if we understand semantics in the narrow sense of referential semantics, then there is no syntax–semantics interface; instead, there is a broader syntax–meaning interface that includes both reference and force. This view opens up new possibilities for reanalyzing diverse empirical phenomena. In particular, two-dimensional meaning theories emerge as special cases of more general interactions between content and force, opening the door to an explanatory account of the projection behavior of conventional implicatures.