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Performatives and the descriptivist's dilemmas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Talbot J. Taylor  and
George Wolf
Talbot J. Taylor
Affiliation:
Trinity and Merton Colleges Oxford
George Wolf
Affiliation:
Trinity and Merton Colleges Oxford
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Extract

With friends like Edmondson (1979), the descriptivist needs no enemies. The descriptivist's dilemma which Harris (1978) drew attention to was a dilemma about the assignment of truth values to performative and corresponding non-performative utterances. Edmondson's appeal to an obscurely drawn distinction between semantics and pragmatics is simply irrelevant to this issue. The semantic theory with which Edmondson saddles the unfortunate descriptivist makes his position, if anything, worse.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , September 1981 , pp. 329 - 332
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

REFERENCES

Edmondson, W. J. (1979). Harris on performatives JL 15. 331–334.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, R. (1978). The descriptive interpretation of performative utterances. JL 14. 309–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spielmann, R. W. (1980). Performative utterances as indexical expressions – comment on Harris. JL 16. 89–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wachtel, T. (1980). Going through the motions. JL 16. 85–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar