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Hearers, Overhearers, and Clark & Carlson's Informative Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Keith Allan
Keith Allan*
Affiliation:
Monash University
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Abstract

Clark & Carlson 1982 claim that ‘every traditional illocutionary act is performed by means of an informative’; they therefore propose an additional initial informative illocution to every speech act analysis envisaged by previous theories. I show that C&C's analysis is unjustified; they apparently confuse perlocutionary effects of utterances or coöperative expectations from participants—and even the communicative presumption—with speakers' illocutionary intentions.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 62 , Issue 3 , September 1986, pp. 509 - 517
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

My sincere thanks to Alice Davison for comments on earlier versions of the present paper. Needless to say, she is in no way to blame for the inadequacies of this version. Thanks also go to Herb Clark, whose trenchant criticisms led me to reconsider and refine my arguments.

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