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Meaning Meeting - Paul Portner / Speaking Frankly

Close portrait of a man with a thin face, round glasses and grin, named Paul Portner, who is a Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University

Meaning Meeting - Paul Portner / Speaking Frankly

Linguistics Wednesday, March 9, 2022 10:00 am - 11:30 am Marie Mount Hall, 1401 (Blue Room)

The Meaning Meeting welcomes special guest, Paul Portner of Georgetown University. Paul will give an analysis of sentential uses of "frankly" (as in "Frankly, Mr. Shankly, this position I've held, it pays my way, and it corrodes my soul") and push against views that encode illocutionary force semantically.  

Speaking Frankly

So-called speech act adverbs like frankly, seriously, and truthfully have been taken as arguments in favor of a grammatical representation of illocutionary force (e.g. Sadock 1974, Bach and Harnish 1979, Krifka 2021, a.o.). This view of force contrasts with the dynamic pragmatics approach, where force is assigned on the basis of content (Portner 2004). I suggest that frankly pertains more to the social relation between conversational participants. As such, it is to be understood in terms of allocutivity, the grammatical marking of the author-addressee relation, rather than speech acts. The talk also considers the role of the author-addressee relation in the pragmatics of imperatives and in explaining the appropriateness of assertions and questions in context. Based on this discussion, I consider the idea that force is determined on the basis of the author-addressee relation encoded in the way made overt by allocutivity, so that there is less reason to assume the encoding of force in grammar than many scholars assume.

Add to Calendar 03/09/22 10:00:00 03/09/22 11:30:00 America/New_York Meaning Meeting - Paul Portner / Speaking Frankly

The Meaning Meeting welcomes special guest, Paul Portner of Georgetown University. Paul will give an analysis of sentential uses of "frankly" (as in "Frankly, Mr. Shankly, this position I've held, it pays my way, and it corrodes my soul") and push against views that encode illocutionary force semantically.  

Speaking Frankly

So-called speech act adverbs like frankly, seriously, and truthfully have been taken as arguments in favor of a grammatical representation of illocutionary force (e.g. Sadock 1974, Bach and Harnish 1979, Krifka 2021, a.o.). This view of force contrasts with the dynamic pragmatics approach, where force is assigned on the basis of content (Portner 2004). I suggest that frankly pertains more to the social relation between conversational participants. As such, it is to be understood in terms of allocutivity, the grammatical marking of the author-addressee relation, rather than speech acts. The talk also considers the role of the author-addressee relation in the pragmatics of imperatives and in explaining the appropriateness of assertions and questions in context. Based on this discussion, I consider the idea that force is determined on the basis of the author-addressee relation encoded in the way made overt by allocutivity, so that there is less reason to assume the encoding of force in grammar than many scholars assume.

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