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What is Said to Whom: A Rejoinder to Allan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Herbert H. Clark
Herbert H. Clark*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Abstract

In Clark & Carlson 1982a, it was noted that traditional theories of speech acts cannot account for what is said to whom when a person speaks to more than one hearer at a time. The proposal was to add a new type of illocutionary act, the informative, in what was called the informative analysis. Allan 1986 has offered a critique of that proposal. This rejoinder considers the major defects in that critique: the fallacious use of illocutionary points and of the so-called communicative presumption; an unprincipled notion of addressee; a misreading of Clark & Carlson on participants; and a tacit confirmation of the informative analysis of certain indirect illocutionary acts. It is argued that these defects are fundamental, and thus Allan's critique collapses.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 62 , Issue 3 , September 1986, pp. 518 - 529
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

Preparation of this paper was supported by grant BNS 83-20284 from the National Science Foundation. I thank Eve V. Clark, Richard P. Meier, and Edward F. Schaefer for advice on the issues discussed here.

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