[YG Conlang Archives] > [engelang group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]

Re: [engelang] Xorban Development



Jorge Llamb�as, On 25/08/2012 21:56:
On Sat, Aug 25, 2012 at 4:13 PM, And Rosta<and.rosta@hidden.email>  wrote:
Jorge Llamb�as, On 25/08/2012 01:04:

Hmm... OK, then I guess this makes the syntactic rules simpler, but
the rules for when it's appropriate to use an illocutionary operator
somewhat more complicated.

What are examples of complications? Why not just put illocutionaries in
the class of predicates?

Is it meaningful, for example, to negate such a predicate? The grammar
allows any predicate to be negated, but I'm not sure what it would
mean to say "I don't hereby command you to do so and so"? Or "I hereby
could command you to do so and so".

Good point! Can we appeal to pragmatics?

I think "Is it lunchtime yet, because I'm getting hungry" could be
analysed as two statements:

(1) I hereby ask whether it is lunchtime yet.
(2) I hereby assert that the reason I ask whether it is lunchtime yet
is because I'm getting hungry.

We mangle both into one utterance so as to not have to repeat the
portion that is common to both statements, but logically they don't
really belong in the same statement if I'm right that only one
illocutionary force per statement is allowed.

How about "hello again"? That doesn't seem to me to involve an illocutionary assertion in addition to an illocutionary salutation.

Furthermore, not all illocutionaries are sentence-level. At a lexical/phrasal level are  "fucking", "surprisingly", and so on.

Quantifiers are not the only things outside the scope of the illocutionary. So are conventional implicatures (e.g. the contrast bit of _but_).

--And.