A problem widely discussed among psychologists, philosophers and linguists is whether there are aspects of conventionality in speech acts. Although in identifying the various components, which are interdependent among themselves, only single illocutory acts and, to more reason, locutory acts are performed within the utterance, it is still controversial whether at the level of langue there is correspondance between aspects of conventionality and these acts, as far as the linguistic means utilised to perform them are conventional . The aim of this paper is to discuss the illocutionary force devices of the grammatical features of the interrogative parentheticals (no?, vero?, etc.) in Italian. Their syntactic distribution and the semantic properties they present seem to bear very crucially on concepts which belong to speech acts. Moreover, such parentheticals can be accounted for by analysing their clusters of grammatical features at two levels of linguistic description. Such representation of illocutionary force devices allows to bring under a single generalisation aspects concerning both the form of the sentences and the related functions, allowing to ground and unify a number of different properties of grammatical structure. However, such an analysis has some consequences for the representations of illocutionary force, as expressed by grammatical means, which would not necessarily include rules for systematically exploiting certain ambiguities and vagueness.
Atti linguistici e struttura grammaticale: interpretazione semantica e distribuzione sintattica di indicatori di forza parentetici
FAVA, Elisabetta
1996
Abstract
A problem widely discussed among psychologists, philosophers and linguists is whether there are aspects of conventionality in speech acts. Although in identifying the various components, which are interdependent among themselves, only single illocutory acts and, to more reason, locutory acts are performed within the utterance, it is still controversial whether at the level of langue there is correspondance between aspects of conventionality and these acts, as far as the linguistic means utilised to perform them are conventional . The aim of this paper is to discuss the illocutionary force devices of the grammatical features of the interrogative parentheticals (no?, vero?, etc.) in Italian. Their syntactic distribution and the semantic properties they present seem to bear very crucially on concepts which belong to speech acts. Moreover, such parentheticals can be accounted for by analysing their clusters of grammatical features at two levels of linguistic description. Such representation of illocutionary force devices allows to bring under a single generalisation aspects concerning both the form of the sentences and the related functions, allowing to ground and unify a number of different properties of grammatical structure. However, such an analysis has some consequences for the representations of illocutionary force, as expressed by grammatical means, which would not necessarily include rules for systematically exploiting certain ambiguities and vagueness.I documenti in SFERA sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
