Publications

Publication details [#9380]

Taylor, Talbot J. and George Wolf. 1981. Performatives and the descriptivist's dilemmas. Journal of Linguistics 17 (2) : 329–332.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English

Annotation

T. and W. argue that the descriptivist who postulates a uniform type of semanticity for all utterances - independent of pragmatics - forces the account of linguistic communication into too uniform an explanatory system, thus placing himself in a dilemma about the assignment of truth values to performative and non-performative utterances.