Linguistics and Literature Studies 6(2): 99-106, 2018 http://www.hrpub.org DOI: 10.13189/lls.2018.060207 Deliberative Dialogues: Deontic Turn-taking and Illocutionary Acts Cristina Corredor Department of Philosophy, University of Valladolid, Spain Copyright©2018 by authors, all rights reserved. Authors agree that this article remains permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License Abstract In deliberation, the participants’ goal is to reach a common conclusion on the best available course of action. The aim of this contribution is to study some deontic aspects that characterize deliberative dialogues as a dialogical (and dialectical) practice. In particular, my exploration is an attempt to consider the way in which deliberation dialogues are structured by virtue of the obligations (commitments, duties) and rights (entitlements, authorizations) that participants assign and recognize each other, on the basis of their performed speech acts. Taking a point of departure in the Austinian approach to speech acts, I will contend that these normative positions, mutually recognized, contribute to determine the illocutionary effect of the utterances and thus the particular speech acts performed in the dialogue. Before that, I will suggest that the proposed claim put forward in a deliberative dialogue can be seen as a verdictive speech act, in that a proposal issues a practical judgement and commits the proponent to giving reasons in support of it. Moreover, whenever an agreement is reached on a proposed claim for action, a new exercitive speech act can be said to have been instituted in which the participants’ joint commitment not only concerns the proposal agreed upon, but also the reasons given and the inferential license that connects both. Keywords Deliberation, Deliberative Dialogue, Speech Acts, Proposal, Turn-taking, Austin, Illocutionary Effect 1. Introduction According to some dialogical approaches to the study of deliberation, the goal of the dialogue is that the participants agree on the best available course of action for implementation. To this, it can be added that deliberation as a communicative practice is intrinsically subject to procedural requirements, in a way that group conversations or even public debates are not. Yet the existence of a certain procedure regulating the participants’ turns does not completely determine the illocutionary force and meaning effectively attained by a particular utterance (cf. Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson [6], Schegloff [8]). According to some speech-act theoreticians, an utterance in context usually conveys a potential of illocutionary forces, and each speech act creates a space of possibilities of appropriate response speech acts (Searle [9]). In the particular case of deliberation dialogues, my suggestion is that the interlocutors’ response shows how the utterance has been taken and thus contributes to determine the illocutionary effect (pragmatic force) that a particular utterance has had in the interaction, provided that this response can be seen as appropriate to the final speech act. Moreover, I suggest that these patterns of initiation-response turns can be analysed taking into account the normative positions (commitments and entitlements, obligations and rights, etc.) mutually assigned and recognized by the interactants. As a point of departure, deliberation is a dialectical and pre-eminently dialogical communicative practice, in which the discussion is directed at the common goal of reaching a joint decision on the best available course of action. Within the framework of dialogical approaches to the study of argumentation (Krabbe and Walton [4], Walton [12]), deliberation is characterized for the following features: (i) it departs from an initial situation in which there is a need for action; (ii) the relationship among participants is collaborative; (iii) the goal of any participant is to coordinate goals and actions; and finally, (iv) the goal of the dialogue is that the participants agree on the best available course of action for implementation. There seems to be a general consensus among scholars in considering that the speech act of making a proposal must be seen as a defining feature of this type of dialogue and is necessarily present, as a first response to the envisaged situation and a starting point. Here, a proposal is understood as a claim of the form “We should do A” or “Action A should be carried out”. Moreover, the fact that it is put forward as the opening illocution of a deliberation dialogue entails that it is open to the critical assessment of other participants. To that extent, an analysis of the role of