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Nick: > The linguists in the audience will at this point grimace at the > performatives. (That's the assumption that any sentence X can be > paraphrased as "I say X" or "I know X".) The performative hypothesis > was big in the early '70s, and blew up spectacularly by the end of the > decade. I don't remember how, which is why I'm using it. :-) It blew up because the whole Generative Semantics enterprise blew up, and that blew up partly because in those days people had (like John! ;) a much weaker grasp of the semantics--pragmatics distinction, so were trying to formalize too much, and mainly because the syntactic rules from semantic representation = Deep Structure to Surface Structure seemed far too arbitrary and unconstrained. However, without acknowledgement, Generative Semantics has returned to life in the last decade, in TG, in a more constrained form, and even the Performative Hypothesis finds a modern incarnation in Mood Phrases and Force Phrases propounded most notably by Luigi Rizzi. Finally, I myself am convinced that the logic of sentences cannot adequately be captured without a certain variety of the Performative Hypothesis. --And.