Lecture 1 Fundamentals of grammar

Felicity conditions are conditions necessary to the success of a speech act.
They are conditions needed for success or achievement of a performative. Loosely
speaking, felicity conditions are of three kinds: preparatory conditions, conditions
for execution and sincerity conditions.
Preparatory conditions include the status or authority of the speaker to
perform the speech act, the situation of other parties and so on. Only certain people
are qualified to declare war, baptize people or sentence convicted felons.
The situation of the utterance is important. If the US President jokingly
“declares” war on another country in a private conversation, then the USA is not
really at war. This, of course, happened (on 11 August 1984), when Ronald
Reagan made some remarks off-air, as he thought, but which have been recorded
for posterity: “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed
legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”
One hopes that this utterance also failed in terms of sincerity conditions.
Conditions for execution require that external circumstances must be
suitable. “Can you give me a lift?” requires that the hearer has a motor vehicle and
is able to drive it somewhere and that the speaker has a reason for the request.
Sincerity conditions show that the speaker must really intend what he or
she says. In the case of apologizing or promising, it may be impossible for others
to know how sincere the speaker is. Moreover sincerity, as a genuine intention
(now) is no assurance that the apologetic attitude will last, or that the promise will
be kept. There are some speech acts – such as plighting one’s troth or taking an
oath – where this sincerity is determined by the presence of witnesses.
2. Pragmatic transposition of sentences
Sometimes a sentence characterized by formal features of some pragmatic
type in speech acquires illocutionary power of sentences of another type. Such
cases are referred to as indirect speech acts. Indirect speech acts are commonly
used to reject proposals and to make requests. For example a speaker asks, “Would you like to meet me for coffee?” and another replies, “I have class.” The second speaker used an indirect speech act to reject the proposal. This is indirect because the literal meaning of “I have class” does not entail any sort of rejection. Typical cases include:
o constative >> requestive: e.g. It is rather cool here. (Please close the window.)
o quesitive >> requestive: e.g. Do you have any cash on you? (Please lend me some.)
o constative >> offertive: e.g. There is some chocolate on the tea table.(Have some.)
A sentence used transpositionally still retains its original meaning. The two
meanings co-exist, the indirect one being layered upon the original one.
It is obvious that there are some restrictions as to types of sentences that can
be transposed. A sentence of any pragmatic type cannot be transposed into any
other pragmatic type.
Apparently, pragmatic transposition of sentences is socially motivated. The
choice of an indirect pragmatic type is explained by extralinguistic conditions of
the communicative situation.