Speech Act

Bilingualism and multilingualism are the speaker’s ability to speak two or more languages. This capability is achieved by the individual speakers, where besides the mother tongue (L1) learners different languages on a parallel basis or gradually, indifferent times and places, creating different language competence, which memorializes in his cognitive and uses the self-actualization in the process of instruction in the language required in compliance with contextual communication situation.
Linguistic diversity reflected in multicultural social community enables all individuals to develop bilingualism and multilingualism skills ranging from family environment with mixed marriages and social environment with formal education systems, formal and informal education for the achievement of personal and collective in ward-processing versatile in every aspect of life.
Achievements of the Individual in ward-processing to multilingual speakers reflected on the enrichment cognitive with different competitive languages, in developing affective achieving empathic on respecting the principle of multicultural democratic society toward psychomotor skills development of oral and written expression in every language, communication towards the provision and acceptance of different messaging and social terms with the facilitation of providing vital existential unemployment challenge in the XXI century.
This project aims to clarify scientific theoretical concepts about bilingualism and multilingualism and with empirical research to illuminate the current state of bilingualism and multilingualism which is used by the speakers to provide vital existentiality in everyday life in the city of Gostivar, Republic of Macedonia. In this research shall use combined questionnaires prepared in advance according to Likert scale and with alternative questions for three groups of bilingual speakers. The survey will held with employed citizens of three ethnic groups in Gostivar with Albanians, Macedonians and Turks.

The aim of the present study is to evaluate the pragmatic information in 'My Book of English, Year Three', a textbook used to teach English in Algerian middle schools. The study attempts to answer four research questions pertaining to the amount of general pragmatic information, speech act treatment, explicit metapragmatic cues, and metalanguage functions. The points of strength and weakness in the pragmatic input offered by the textbook under question were identified. To illustrate, a number of speech acts were explicitly mentioned and practised, though most of them appeared in conspicuous absence of adequate metapragmatic and sociopragmatic discussions. In our view, the present findings have important implications for EFL textbook-designers and teachers alike.

ABSTRACT
Refusing an invitation from another person is potentially face-threatening and therefore with knowledge of such potential danger, interlocutors employ different ways of minimising such threats. This paper is an attempt to contribute to the ongoing discussion on the maintenance of face in the performance of face threatening acts such as refusals. By means of ethnography of communication and theories of face and politeness, the paper analyses and discusses some ways of refusing invitations among members of the Berekum College of Education. The paper identifies two main ways of saying no to invitations, direct and indirect, and tries to find out how these ways are influenced by sex differences as well as age and social status.The study concludes that the different ways of refusing invitations are largely influenced by the above-mentioned variables. The paper has implications for social relations and cross-cultural understanding.

Key Words: refusing, invitation, face, face-threatening act, sex, age, social status

Le texte présent est l'étude proposée pour une Habilitation à Diriger les Recherches, soutenue à l'E.P.H.E., en juin 2019, avant le Prof. Olivier Boulnois comme garant.
Ce texte a été publié sous le titre:
Opérativité du langage chez Maître Eckhart. ‘Obstetricandi scientia’, Louvain-La-Neuve, Ed. Peeters, coll. « Philosophes médiévaux », Tome LXXII, 2021.
Le texte publié chez Peeters présente des notes réduites par rapport à l'HDR. Les extraits eckhartiens y sont cités en français uniquement. Le texte PDF présent contient des notes plus détaillées avec la version originale (latin, moyen haut-allemand) des extraits cités. La numérotation des notes est conservée entre les deux textes.

У статті " Розуміння компліменту як мовленнєвого акту в працях учених ХХ – поч. ХХІ ст. " показано місце мовленнєвого акту компліменту у класифікаціях Дж. Остіна та Дж. Серля, відмежовано комплімент від суміжних мовленнєвих актів, проаналізовано можливі реакції на комплімент, а також виокремлено його основні завдання та функції.

The article " Compliment as a speech act in the scientific works of the XX – XXI cent. " devotes to the role of the speech act compliment in the classifications of J. Austin and J. Searle, the compliment is separated from the other similar speech acts, the possible reactions on the compliment are analyzed and the main functions and tasks of the compliment are distinguished.

The speech act of refusal is an area that has been considered by a variety of researchers. However, to date a specific comparison of native speakers of British English (NS) with nonnative (NNS) Saudi speakers has not been undertaken. This study fills this gap by exploring the similarities and differences in the refusal strategies of British English (NS) and (NNS) Saudis studying in the United Kingdom (UK). For the study, 33 subjects were asked to respond to 10 different scenarios, where they were required to carry out the speech act of refusal, allowing for data collection through a Discourse Completion Test. The resultant data was analysed in terms of semantic formulas and categorised according to the Beebe et al's (1990) refusal taxonomy. The results suggested differences between the two groups in refusal performance. Regret or saying "sorry", accompanied by excuses and explanations were the preferred formula for refusal in both groups, although direct refusal strategies were also relied on by the two groups. This suggests a basis for the application of Brown and Levinson's, (1987), politeness model in terms of universality. The choice of direct refusals for the NNS Saudi's also suggests the influence of British culture in respondents' realizations of refusals in English. From the research, it is suggested that refusal strategies and patterns are greatly influenced by native language and that the amount of time spent by NNS Saudis in the UK has an impact on their refusal strategies. The impact of this is that in order for NNS to develop appropriate pragmatic ability there is a need to recognize the influence of native language on refusal strategies in a second language as well as the experience of speaking with NS speakers. Further work is thus needed to understand the levels of impact of these two areas.

Hospitality sector becomes one of the excellent economic growth in Bali as Bali becomes one of the world best tourism destinations. Bali, in fact is a destination where the largest hotel opening project growth compared to other potential destinations in Indonesia. Many hotels, villas and resorts are spread over the island which offer many different facilities and specialties. The hotel industries face dynamic challenges both internally and externally, such as environmental issues, infrastructure issues, lack of innovation, incompetence employees, aggressive competitors, etc. The hotel industry is facing extremely competition so that hotels need to select a suitable strategy to gain their competitive advantage. One of the common strategies to promote accommodations including hotels, villas, resorts or homestay is by using printed advertisements published on popular tourism magazines. This study aims at identifying and analyzing the use of speech acts in accommodation advertisements. The advertisers compete to create outstanding advertisements in term of lexical choice and visual effects. The language of advertising is commonly unique and extraordinary. It is very interesting to analyze. The data were taken from selected Bali tourism magazines, such as Bali & Beyond, Hello Bali and Bali Now magazine. They were chosen as the data source because they are the most popular and highly trusted tourism magazines in Bali. The data were collected by observation method with note taking technique. Then data were analyzed by using qualitative method and using theory of Pragmatic by Austin (1962), Yule (1996), Searle (1997). The analysis is presented through informal method.

This paper investigates the speech act of refusal taking as a case study British responses to a salesperson's offer through the study of recordings of 109 conversations between the salesperson and a potential British customer. The data are analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively with the aim of finding the most frequent responses that denote refusal by the English native speakers. Most of the expressions used to reflect the British people's annoyance with the use of cold calls, the majority being brief phrases of refusal. In addition to the recorded calls, two questionnaires were conducted in Britain to shed light on the frequent expressions used on the phone in response to the salesperson. It is interesting here to catalog the range of strategies used by individuals, most of the time verbal, to avoid talking to the salesperson. These strategies seem to exist on a continuum of directness-indirectness. Firstly to perform an act of refusal efficient enough to end the call. Secondly to make the balance between the impacts of refusal per se and the keeping up with the social convention of mutual cooperation presented in the theory of politeness.

In order to understand the function of compliments in a speech behavior, this cross-cultural study will compare many aspects of Mexican Spanish and American English compliments. In addition, differences and similarities in complimenting in both languages will be analyzed to find a practical use and understanding. For instance: to find a syntactic rule or formula in which we can find a common pattern in the structure of complimenting.
The speech act of complimenting in this study was selected because American and Mexican L2 learners of Spanish and English, get confused when they try to make or understand a compliment in the target language. Also, the misunderstanding of compliments carries false interpretations leading to Pragmatic failure.

OBJECTIVES
        First of all, it is important to mention the general goals of the present study.
(1) To avoid misunderstandings and Pragmatic failure.
(2) To use and understand the correct ways of complimenting in both languages.
        Secondly, the specific goals of this study are:
(3) To compare American and Mexican compliments in order to know the patterns being used by the speakers, as well as to find what are the similarities and differences in: (compliment frequency; attributes praised; role relationship between the speakers; gender of the speakers; tone used and compliment form that includes: number of words, adjectives and verbs used in the compliments).
(4) To understand and explain some factors of meaning toward the compliments, to avoid false interpretations of the compliments.
(5) To find the appropriate equivalent of the compliments in the target language, (if a L2 student does not know the meaning of the expression or if the equivalent in the L2 does not exist). In other words, to find how a native speaker would say such an expression, in order to show the meaning of the compliments correctly.

The present study aimed to investigate the cross-cultural differences with regards to the production of a relatively understudied speech act, namely congratulations. To this end, 48 American native speakers, 50 Persian native speakers as well as 44 native speakers of Syrian Arabic language were asked to fill out a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) consisting of 4 situations on each of which the participants were asked to offer congratulations. The frequencies of each strategy, content of semantic formulas as well as their shift according to the status of the hearer were investigated.

This research discussed apology strategies in English by native speaker. This descriptive study was presented within the framework of Pragmatics based on the forms of strategies due to the coding manual as found in CCSARP (Cross-Cultural Speech Acts Realization Project).The goals of this study were to describe the apology strategies in English by native speaker and identify the influencing factors of it. Data were collected through the use of the questionnaire in the form of Discourse Completion Test, which was distributed to 30 native speakers. Data were classified based on the degree of familiarity and the social distance between speaker and hearer and then the data of native will be separated and classified by the type of strategies in coding manual. The results of this study are the pattern of apology strategies of native speaker brief with the pattern that potentially occurs IFID plus Offer of repair plus Taking on responsibility. While Alerters, Explanation and Downgrading appear with less number of percentage. Then, the factors that influence the apology utterance by native speakers are the social situation, the degree of familiarity and degree of the offence which more complicated the mistake tend to produce the most complex utterances by the speaker.

Cross-cultural analyses of speech acts are among the hot topics in contrastive studies and up to now various researchers have explored this very issue. Despite the ample studies in this field, the speech act of congratulation, especially the subject of ‘birthday congratulation’ remains untouched. The study investigates the possible effects of being an Iranian or an American typical Facebook user upon the kind of the category which is drawn upon to send an addressee a birthday congratulation note on Facebook. The data collected are 120 birthday congratulation notes issued by 60 Iranians and 60 Americans on Facebook. Seven dominant categories emerged from the study namely ‘Illocutionary Force Indicating Device’ (IFID), ‘Blessing Wishes’, ‘Divine Statements’, ‘Poem and Pieces of Literature’, ‘Endearments’, ‘Felling Expressions’ and ‘Compliments’. Moreover, the possible significant differences between the two groups within these categories were explored. The paper concluded that, in fiv...

ABSTRAK
Bahasa merupakan alat interaksi sosial atau alat komunikasi antarmanusia, termasuk di dalamnya komunikasi antara guru dengan siswa dalam kegiatan belajar mengajar di kelas. Dalam setiap komunikasi di kelas, guru dan siswa saling menyampaikan informasi yang dapat berupa pikiran, gagasan, maksud, perasaan, maupun emosi secara langsung. Setiap proses komunikasi memunculkan tindak tutur dalam satu situasi tutur. Hal inilah yang melatarbelakangi penulis untuk melakukan penelitian. Adapun tujuan penelitian ini adalah untuk mendeskripsikan bentuk-bentuk tindak tutur direktif guru dalam pembelajaran teks eksposisi di Kelas X IPS-3 SMA Negeri 3 Boyolali. Strategi yang penulis pilih adalah langsung literal agar mempermudah pemahaman terhadap mitra tutur. Objek penelitian ini adalah tindak tutur guru dan siswa dalam proses pembelajaran. Subjek penelitian ini adalah seorang guru yang mengajar bahasa Indonesia di Kelas X IPS-3 SMA Negeri 3 Boyolali. Pengumpulan data menggunakan metode pengamatan, perekaman, dan pencatatan. Hasil penelitian membuktikan bahwa bentuk tindak tutur direktif langsung literal yang dilakukan guru dalam pembelajaran teks eksposisi di Kelas X IPS-3 SMA Negeri 3 Boyolali berfungsi untuk menyuruh, memohon, menuntut, menyarankan, dan menantang. Tindak tutur direktif langsung literal yang dominan dilakukan guru dalam pembelajaran adalah menyuruh. Kata Kunci: tindak tutur, direktif langsung literal, pembelajaran teks eksposisi.

ABSTRACT
Language is a means of social interaction or communication among people, including the communication among teachers and students in the teaching and learning activities in the classroom. In every classroom communication, the teacher and student convey information to each other that can be thoughts, ideas, intentions, feelings, or emotions directly. Every communication process brings up acts of speech in a speech situation. This is what lies behind the author to do this study. The purpose of this study is to describe the forms of directive speech acts of the teacher in learning text exposition in Class X IPS-3 SMA Negeri 3 Boyolali. The strategy choosen by the author is literal direct to facilitate understanding towards the interlocutor. The object of this study is the speech acts of teachers and students in the learning process. The subject of this study is a teacher who teaches Indonesian in Class X IPS-3 SMA Negeri 3 Boyolali. The data are collected using observation, recording and noting methods. The result of the research proves that the form of literal direct directive speech act done by teacher in exposition text lesson in Class X IPS-3 SMA

«In his article “The Formal Apparatus of Enunciation” (1970), the linguist Émile Benveniste outlines his theory of enunciation through the rejection of some false examples of dialogue. One of them is the hain-teny, a verbal play exchanged by the Merinas of Madagascar. But Benveniste had dedicated another brief essay to the notion of «play» («jeu»): “Le jeu comme structure” (1947). in this one he formalizes the transformation of a sacred act into a play: the latter is none but a faint image of the former, and thus has no power over reality. In connecting these two articles, this present work aims to show the presence of Benveniste’s reflection on play into his final take on the enunciation, thus adding a link between enunciation, speech acts and performativity.»

The speech act of promise in communication in Polish and Russian

The topic of this paper is the speech act of promise in Polish and Russian. The purpose of the contrastive analysis is an attempt to identify and describe the speech act of promise from the point of view of linguistic pragmatics. The language material includes examples taken from the corpora of the Polish and Russian languages and from observations of colloquial speech.
The paper locates the act of promise in the classification of speech acts proposed by Austin, Searle and Formanovskaya. The aim of this paper is to determine the felicity conditions of this speech act from the point of view of linguistic pragmatics, as well as to present the functioning of this act in language communication.
The basis of the analysis is the structure of the act of promise proposed by the present author. The article analyses explicit expressions of promise using the performative verb (e.g. I promise that I will write the letter tomorrow; I promise I won’t cry anymore) and other lexical markers of this speech act, as well as implicit speech acts of promise characterized by the use of the future tense (I will be your friend; We will rule wisely) or the present tense referring to the future (You prepare the translation and receive money).

Key words: commissive speech acts, linguistic pragmatics, speech acts, promise, semantics

לשפה המילולית נקשרו כתרים רבים במסורות שונות. רב כוחה של השפה
עד שהוכרז כי "מוות וחיים ביד לשון". 2 השפה היא גם המפגש הראשוני בין
עולם ואל. כבר ביום הראשון לבריאה אנו נתקלים באמירה, אמירה יוצרת:
"ויאמר אלוהים יהי אור". השפה המילולית, אם כן, איננה אך אמצעי תקשורת
בסיסי, כי אם הרבה יותר מכך. 3 השפה בוראת עולם, ברם יכולה היא גם
להחריבו. דבר זה נכון הן כלפי העולם הקוסמי הכללי הן כלפי העולם הפרטי-
אישי או הבין-אישי.
מאמר זה מבקש להתחקות אחר כוחה של השפה המילולית, והמילולית
דווקא, ביחסים שבין אדם לחברו תוך השוואה ליחסים שקובעת ההלכה ביחס
לשפה המילולית שבין האדם למקום.

Este trabajo es un estudio heurístico de carácter contrastivo sobre las estrategias que utilizan universitarios chinos y españoles para responder a un cumplido sobre habilidad, posesión, apariencia y personalidad.
En los años 80, tuvo lugar el desarrollo de la pragmática y de la sociolingüística. Se estudiaron diversos actos de habla y el fenómeno universal de la cortesía lingüística, un elemento de vital importancia en la comunicación intercultural, ya que ayuda a establecer, mantener o asentar relaciones interpersonales armoniosas, reduciendo la posibilidad de hallarnos frente a conflictos o malentendidos. Como resultado de este interés, diversos autores comenzaron a estudiar el acto de habla del cumplido, entendiéndose como un acto de habla que permite crear lazos de solidaridad entre el hablante y su interlocutor (Havertake, 1994) dentro de las estrategias de la cortesía positiva (Brown y Levinson, 1978; Holmes, 1988), si bien, se ve influido por diversos convencionalismos sociales.
Pese a la abundancia de estudios sobre este acto de habla en comunidades lingüísticas relacionadas con el mundo anglosajón, todavía no se ha profundizado en el estudio del cumplido en comunidades lingüísticas más alejadas como la china y, sobre todo, dentro del ámbito de la pragmática intercultural. Hasta el momento,
no se han realizado estudios contrastivos entre el español peninsular y el chino. Dado que el cumplido forma parte de la pragmática y la enseñanza de aspectos pragmáticos y socioculturales en el aula es una parte indisociable de la enseñanza de lenguas, consideramos que su estudio es esencial.
El análisis realizado en esta investigación se basa en un corpus formado por 918 estrategias expresadas a través de 600 respuestas a cumplidos realizadas por estudiantes universitarios: 25 chinos y 25 españoles; 12 hombres y 13 mujeres en cada grupo. Hemos utilizado la herramienta Test para completar el discurso (Discourse completion test) para recopilar los datos. El cuestionario se administró a los informantes desde finales del mes de junio hasta mediados de julio del año 2016,
quienes pudieron completarlo en línea. Las variables independientes cuyo impacto hemos analizado son: sexo, edad, lugar de origen, distancia social y poder social. Usamos metodología cualitativa para elaborar el cuestionario y metodología cuantitativa para desarrollar el estudio exploratorio con ayuda del programa Excel de Microsoft. Según los resultados de nuestra investigación, los informantes españoles
prefieren utilizar respuestas compuestas, es decir, formadas por varias estrategias, mientras que los informantes chinos tienden a usar respuestas simples. Las macroestrategias más utilizadas en los dos corpus son la elaboración positiva y la aceptación. No obstante, los informantes chinos tienden a usar más que los informantes españoles la categoría rechazo. Asimismo, hemos encontrado estrategias exclusivas en ambos corpus. En cuanto a las variables independientes, tanto en el corpus español como en el chino se aprecia cierto efecto del poder social, la distancia social y el sexo, si bien, influye de forma diferente en cada uno.
En definitiva, pese a estudiar dos comunidades lingüísticas alejadas entre sí y con modelos de cortesía particulares, encontramos bastantes puntos en común en relación a las formas de responder al acto de habla del cumplido.

Abstract: This article aims at carrying out a pragmatic analysis of a selected extract from Donald Trump’s acceptance speech delivered at the Republican National Convention on July 21st, 2016. The study mainly focuses on the identification and the analysis of linguistic features of speech acts (Austin 1962 and Searl 1969) used in the political language of the acceptance speech to uncover the way Donald Trump has encoded his own intentions and his party’s expectations therein. The identification of illocutionary acts indicates the presence of representative acts, directive acts, expressive acts, commissive acts, and declarative acts. The interpretation of the findings reveals the dominance of representative illocutionary acts which shows that Trump has mainly expressed his personal beliefs, on the one hand, and displayed his truth engagement to lead his party to the White House, on the other. Directive illocutionary acts are used to suggest some solutions, while commissive acts are used to point out challenges of security and peace to be taken up once elected. As for expressive acts, they reflect Trump’s psychological state, while addressing the audience at the convention. The article concludes that the study of speech acts has made it easy to comprehend the message in President Donald Trump’s speech. Keywords: Speech acts, Republican National Convention, Pragmatics, political speech, illocutionary acts.

Ethical oaths for bankers, economists and managers are increasingly seen as successful instruments to ensure more responsible behaviour. In this article, we reflect on the nature of ethical oaths. Based on John Austin's speech act theory and the work of Emmanuel Levinas, we introduce a performative concept of ethical oaths that is characterised by (1) the existential self-performative of the one I want to be, which is (2) demanded by the public context. Because ethical oaths are (3) structurally threatened by the possibility of infelicity or failure, we stress (4) the behavioural aspect of ethical oaths in economics and business. We conclude that a performative concept of ethical oaths can contribute to more ethical behaviour in economics and business, because the performative involves action and behaviour. At the same time, it becomes clear that a radical new perspective on the nature, function and limitation of oaths is needed.

When ideas about theatre are used to describe political events, the theatrical is usually made to stand for that which is undesirable, inauthentic and empty about political life: we might describe a particular speech or gesture as ‘only theatre’, or use language such as ‘playing politics’ or ‘political drama’ to denounce the way self-referential questions about character or personal intrigue have obscured the ‘real’ issues of politics. In contrast to this dismissive usage, I would like to explore the ways that theatricality’s apparent failures or shortcomings might be themselves generative of political potential. My approach here is to consider certain problems of speech and gesture in the political realm as essentially theatrical problems — problems for theatre, but also ideas that theatricality makes problems of — such as problems of representation, authenticity and spectatorship. I will explore the theatricality at work in three examples of publicly performed discourse: Kevin Rudd’s official apology in 2008 to the Indigenous peoples of Australia; a gallery artwork by Carey Young which, in its entirety, is a legal disclaimer of its status as art; and a text and video work by Lebanese-born artist, Rabih Mroué, in which the artist offers an apology for the Lebanese civil war.

Bilingualism and multilingualism are the speaker’s ability to speak two or more languages. This capability is achieved by the individual speakers, where besides the mother tongue (L1) learners different languages on a parallel basis or gradually, indifferent times and places, creating different language competence, which memorializes in his cognitive and uses the self-actualization in the process of instruction in the language required in compliance with contextual communication situation. Linguistic diversity reflected in multicultural social community enables all individuals to develop bilingualism and multilingualism skills ranging from family environment with mixed marriages and social environment with formal education systems, formal and informal education for the achievement of personal and collective in ward-processing versatile in every aspect of life. Achievements of the Individual in ward-processing to multilingual speakers reflected on the enrichment cognitive with differ...

This catalogue presents projects initiated by the 2019 class of the Experimental Publishing master course (XPUB), which focuses on the acts of making things public and creating publics in the age of post-digital networks/ This version includes only the project Let’s Amplify Unspeakable Things. It is an online platform of exploration and research, regarding female voices in public and their amplification. It creates a space for excluded voices to be explored, that questions the establishment of authoritative voices — which construct exclusive speech platforms and binaries, along the assumption that voices have to be rational in public dialogues.

Abstrak Penelitian ini bertujuan mendeskripsikan struktur argumen berdasarkan tipe kompleksitas dan penarikan simpulan dalam wacana karya tulis ilmiah mahasiswa. Pendekatan penelitian yang digunakan ialah deskriptif kualitatif dengan metode analisis isi komunikasi. Sumber data penelitian adalah skripsi mahasiswa Jurusan Tarbiyah STAIN Manado. Hasil penelitian sebagai berikut. Pertama, struktur argumen berdasarkan kompleksitasnya terdiri dari struktur argumen sederhana dan struktur argumen kompleks. Struktur argumen kompleks terdiri dari struktur argumen alasan berdampingan dan struktur argumen alasan bertingkat. Kedua, struktur argumen berdasarkan penarikan simpulan dibedakan menjadi struktur argumen induktif dan struktur argumen deduktif. Abstract This study aims to describe argument structures based on types of complexity and conclusion drawing in students' academic writing discourse. It employed the qualitative descriptive approach using the communication content analysis method. The data sources were undergraduate theses written by students of the Department of Tarbiyah, STAIN Manado. The results of the study are as follows. First, the argument structures based on types of complexity comprise a simple argument structure and a complex argument structure. The complex argument structure consists of an adjacent argument structure and a multi-layer argument structure. Second, the argument structures based on conclusion drawing consist of an inductive argument structure and a deductive argument structure.

Mackie’s claim that in general courage benefits its possessor seems inconsistent with his ‘error theory’ of value.  But how plausible is it in itself?  I suggest that his arguments for the claim fail in the same way as the arguments of those who more explicitly embrace ‘virtue ethics’ fail.  We do not know any way of objectively weighing risks against other considerations, of deciding whether something is ‘worth the risk’.  Since I have no PROOF that there could not be a way, I prefer to speak of ‘ignorance’ rather than ‘error’ here.

Early work on the philosophy of language was unconcerned with language as a tool for communication: the pioneers of ‘ideal’ language philosophy were interested in how insights from logical languages might be applied to the study of ‘language’ in a very general sense. This chapter traces the development of a less formalized approach to meaning and communication based around linguistic action. It discusses Austin’s speech act theory and Grice’s theories of conversation and meaning and shows how this work laid the foundations not only for a more action-oriented account of communication but also a more psychological view of pragmatics.

An agent A blames B hypocritically for violating a moral norm N if and only if: (i) A is likewise blameworthy for violating N, and (ii) A is not disposed to blame herself for violating N. Normally, an assertion involving blame is retracted following the objection that (i) and (ii) hold. I discuss two prima facie explanations for such a withdrawal: that the objection hampers the speaker’s assertoric authority, rendering (i) and (ii) the necessary condition to assert, and that the joint condition is, instead, merely a regulative rule. Having shown that the former option is too revisory as it requires reformulation of all normative accounts of assertion on the table, and the latter false, I proceed to argue that (i) and (ii) do not target assertions to begin with. An assertion involving blame is, instead, a clear case of a double speech act: after arguing for this claim, I proceed to show that qua assertion, the act is correct given one’s preferred normative account, whereas it is incorrect qua blaming, as in order to perform such an act, the speaker needs to satisfy the conditions (i) and (ii).

This Insight examines a judgment of the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice in case C-507/17, NH v. Associazione Avvocatura per I Diritti LGBTI-Rete Lenford (23 April 2020). In its preliminary ruling, the Court deliberated on whether a statement made by a senior lawyer at an Italian law firm during a media interview, abstractly asserting that he would never hire a gay colleague, constituted direct discrimination in terms of EU law, even though no specific vacancy opening was advertised at the time of the interview. Furthermore, the Court considered whether a local LGBTI organization (an association of lawyers) had standing to bring a lawsuit for damages even though none of its affiliates were applying for a position at the law firm. The case fits the sequel-now forming a "Luxembourg trilogy"-of three judgments of the Court of Justice on similar matters of racist and homophobic speech akin to direct discrimination in the employment context, with judgments in C-54/07 Feryn (10 July 2008) and C-81/12 Asociaţia ACCEPT (25 April 2013) preceding the C-507/17 NH and answering most of NH's outstanding questions. It remains questionable, therefore, whether the preliminary ruling of the Court of Justice in the NH case was even necessary in terms of the acte clair doctrine or whether this 2020 judgment substantively clarified EU anti-discrimination law.

I argue that Mackie's thesis about courage and self-interest is neither consistent with his 'error theory' of value nor convincing in itself.  The question of the objectivity of value needs to be distinguished from that of whether one value can objectively outweigh or outrank another.  This is so even when the only values under consideration are self-interested ones.

Old fi ndings on children’s comprehension of ask and tell were subject to different interpretations refl ecting progress in the fi eld of language acquisition. We want to show that acquiring a particular skill does not necessarily include competence of its intentional control and use. Development of linguistic skills takes place at different levels starting from early spontaneous, implicit abilities to the level of meta-pragmatic refl exive knowledge that enables deliberate monitoring, planning, and practice. The present study was aimed at exploring two extreme points in development: early epi-pragmatic and late refl exive metapragmatic competence. The fi rst part aims at fi nding the earliest instances of children spontaneous ability to pass ask-instructions, and the evidence is provided for the ages as early as 22 to 40 months (much earlier than recorded in the previous studies). The second part is experimental and focuses on children’s ability to respond to ask- and tell-instruct...