Force and Conversational States
Force and Conversational States
This essay sketches an approach to speech acts in which mood does not semantically determine illocutionary force. The conventional content of mood determines the semantic type of the clause in which it occurs, and, given the nature of discourse, that type most naturally lends itself to serving as a particular type of speech act, that is, to serving as one of the three basic types of language game moves-making an assertion (declarative); posing a question (interrogative); or proposing to one’s addressee(s) the adoption of a goal (imperative). This type of semantics for grammatical mood is illustrated with the imperative.
Keywords: speech acts, illocutionary force, grammatical mood, language game, imperative
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
