Timothy Shopen (ed.) Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Speech Act Distinctions in Grammar Ekkehard König & Peter Siemund 1 Speech acts and sentence types 1 In contrast to the traditional view that the function of language is essentially a descriptive one, it is now generally accepted that in speaking we perform actions of various kinds. This is clearest in the case of so-called ‘performative utterances’ like the following: (1) a. I (hereby) order you to leave the room. b. I promise you never to be late again. c. I hereby declare this meeting closed. d. I hereby christen this ship “Queen Elizabeth”. Sentences like these are special insofar as their utterance in appropriate circumstances amounts to performing the action identified by the finite verb. The typical formal properties of such sentences in English include first person subjects, second person indirect objects, a present tense non-progressive active form of a speech act verb and the deictic adverb hereby, but performative sentences may also be in the passive voice, contain modal hedges and a nominalization instead of a verb: (2) a. You are cordially invited to come to my birthday party. b. I must admit that you have won that argument. c. I’ll come to see you next week, and that’s a promise. European languages, in particular, have large inventories of such ‘performative verbs’, but ‘performative utterances’ of the type (1) or (2), i.e. sentences whose meaning is such that we can perform the action named by the verb just by saying literally that we are performing it, are rarely used. Most frequently, they seem to occur in institutional settings, where they are part of more elaborate rituals. In fact many, if not all, ‘performative verbs’ (e.g. ‘marry’, ‘chris- ten’, ‘appoint’, ‘resign’, ‘baptize’, ‘veto’, ‘guarantee’ and even ‘bet’ or ‘promise’ etc.) pre- suppose the existence of the relevant extra-linguistic social institutions. A second important context seems to be the one where the action performed by an utterance is unclear and needs to be made fully explicit. In most verbal interactions, however, the kind of speech act per- formed by an utterance is only very weakly determined by the meaning of the sentence ut- tered. A simple imperative like “Sit here”, for instance could be used as a command, request, offer, advisory or exhortation, depending on the context, as is shown by the following poten- tial responses: “Yes, sir” (command), “Okay” (request), “No thanks” (offer), “What a good idea” (advisory), “Thank you” (exhortation) (cf. Clark, 1996: 213). Examples such as these show that it is only the communicative potential of a sentence, a default interpretation, that is determined by its formal and semantic properties. The precise speech act performed by an utterance is the result of an interaction between these properties and various contextual fac- tors, such as the social situation, the current state of an interaction and the background knowl- edge of speaker and hearer. Moreover, our examples suggest that the precise function (illocu- tionary force) of an utterance may partly be the result of cooperative negotiations between speaker and hearer. Three basic sentence types are traditionally distinguished for European languages and have also been found useful for many other languages: declarative, interrogative and impera- tive sentences. 2 Declarative sentences are primarily and most frequently used for speech acts König, Ekkehard and Peter Siemund (2007) ‘Speech act distinctions in grammar’, in: Timothy Shopen (ed.) Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 276-324.