Full Description
Speech-act theory is the interdisciplinary study of the wide range of things we do with words. Originally stemming from the influential work of twentieth-century philosophers, including J. L. Austin and Paul Grice, recent years have seen a resurgence of work on the topic. On one hand, a new generation of linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists have made impressive progress toward reverse-engineering the psychological underpinnings that allow us to do so much with language. Meanwhile, speech-act theory has been used to enrich our understanding of pressing social issues that include freedom of speech, racial slurs, and the duplicity of political discourse.
This volume presents fourteen new essays by many of the philosophers and linguists who have led this resurgence. The topics span a methodological range that includes formal semantics and pragmatics, foundational issues about the nature of linguistic representation, and work on a variety of forms of indirect and/or uncooperative speech that occupies the intersection of the philosophy of language, ethics, and political philosophy. Several of the contributions demonstrate the benefits of integrating the methodologies and perspectives of these literatures. The essays are framed by a comprehensive introductory survey of the contemporary literature written by the editors.
Contents
1: Daniel W. Harris, Daniel Fogal, and Matt Moss: Speech Acts: The Contemporary Theoretical Landscape
2: Elisabeth Camp: Insinuation, Common Ground, and the Conversational Record
3: Nate Charlow: Clause-Type, Force, and Normative Judgment in the Semantics of Imperatives
4: Mitchell S. Green: A Refinement and Defense of the Force/Content Distinction
5: Peter Hanks: Types of Speech Acts
6: Rae Langton: Blocking as Counter-Speech
7: Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone: Explicit Indirection
8: Mary Kate McGowan: On Covert Exercitives: Speech and the Social World
9: Sarah E. Murray and William B. Starr: Force and Conversational States
10: Geoff Nunberg: The Social Life of Slurs
11: Paul Portner: Commitment to Priorities
12: Craige Roberts: Speech Acts in Discourse Context
13: Jennifer Saul: Dogwhistles, Political Manipulation, and Philosophy of Language
14: Robert Stalnaker: Dynamic Pragmatics, Static Semantics
15: Seth Yalcin: Expressivism by Force
