Blackwell Reference Online

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I want to begin by describing some appearances. The word “appearances” is important - as will emerge at length below, these appearances might be misleading. That warning being issued, it appears that ordinary speakers routinely utter non-sentences, and in so doing perform full-blown speech acts. In saying this, I don't mean that they appear to produce non-linguistic gestures and such, thereby performing speech acts. (How could something be a speech act, and be non-linguistic?) Nor do I mean that they utter ungrammatical sentences and yet succeed in asserting, or asking, or ordering. It seems plausible that speakers do the latter, but that isn't the issue I will be discussing. Instead, what I mean is that speakers appear to utter, consciously and by design, fully grammatical expressions which happen to be less-than-sentential: nouns and NPs, adjectives and AdjPs, as well as PPs, VPs, and so on. That is, speakers routinely utter bare words and phrases not syntactically embedded in any sentence, and they thereby perform speech acts like asserting, asking, commanding, and so on. Again, so it appears. That bare words/phrases can be so used might seem obvious. Many would grant, for example, that a hearer may answer a question with a mere word or a phrase. For instance, Tracy says, “Where do you live?”, and Isaac replies, “London.” There are also examples of correction (repairs): Tracy ... log in or subscribe to read full text