Mikhail Smirnov gave a talk at the Université Côte d'Azur
On June 10, Mikhail Smirnov, a researcher at IL LogLinFF, delivered a remote presentation entitled "Hosting a Performative Clause: on Structural Variety and Semantics of Performative Utterances" at the research workshop "Clausal Complements" organized by the University of the Cote d'Azur.
Workshop's website: https://synsemuca.tumblr.com/
Abstract:
In this talk, I begin with describing one insufficiently addressed structural difference between performative utterances. The notion of ‘performative utterance’ presupposes that some sentences in some speech acts are used not for description of current realities but for establishing of new ones. One can see the mentioned difference by comparing, e. g., (1) and (2):
- I pronounce that they are married.
- I promise that she will agree.
Despite of syntactic similarity, these examples are structurally different. In (1), what is considered to happen by performative force is the situation described by that-clause (their marrying). In (2), it’s not the situation described by that-clause but the situation denoted by the main verb (promising).
This duality was not sufficiently articulated in the previous literature, probably because utterances of the second type are often formulated not with a that-clause but some other way (e. g., ‘I promise to…’).
Then, I discuss a semantic framework for rendering this structural difference, addressing the ontological category of attitudinal objects. The notion of ‘attitudinal objects’, which roots can be found in Twardowski (1911) and Ulrich (1976), was recently developed in Moltmann (2013, 2020, 2023), being also discussed in a number of other publications. I argue that this notion allows us to formulate a clear referential account of performative utterances.