Research on Meaning and Force in Speech Acts

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In this research project, I have developed elementary part of an ascription-based theory of illocutionary acts. It is "ascription-based" in the sense that its basic formulas are formulas ascribing actions to agents. They are used in order to state facts about particular utterances and illocutionary acts performed by agents. The language of the theory also contains formulas used for stating constraints upon possible combinations of types of contexts, types of utterances, types of possiblle illocutionary acts, aud types of background conditions. It doesn't contain, however, formulas for giving commands, making promises, making requests, aud so on. It is not meant to be an all-purpose language in which all sorts of illocutionary acts could be performed, but is meant to be a special-purpose language for stating various theoretical assumptions, hypotheses and their consequences about speech acts performed in natural languages.This theory contains a general theory of content for illocutionary acts which is based on a generalized version of J.L.Austin's theory of Truth. By extending Austin's notions of demonstrative and descriptive conventions so as to cover cases not only of assertives but also of illocutionary acts other than assertives, it specifies contents of contentful illocutionary acts through specifying conditions of their satisfaction without appealing to the notion of propositions. It respects the intuition that commauds and promises are not things which can be true or false.This theory treats illocutionary acts as acts, i.e.that which change situations. It aims to characterize each illocutionary force in terms of types of changes in types of situations which illocutionary acts with those forces bring about.In developing this theory, I have adopted a version of the language of Situation Theory.