Are discourse-initial action-guiding verbless speech acts elliptical?

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the discussion of the approach to the grammatical analysis of speech acts by testing an ellipsis-based analysis of verbless speech acts. The analysis tested implies the following relevant conditions for ellipsis: either the context makes manifest a salient action, licensing the ellipsis of do it, or a script associated with the current activity makes manifest a particular linguistic expression, licensing the ellipsis of the expression. The hypothesis is tested on 12 speech acts stemming from a set of observations of 240 discourse-initial action-guiding verbless speech acts in Danish. The result of the context-based ellipsis is that the majority of the examples either become ungrammatical or change meaning when gør det (do it) is added. The result of the script-based ellipsis is that in some cases there is no manifest verb, and in other cases the manifest verb cannot be added without causing ungrammaticality. In general, the recovered illocutionary force indicating device is misleading. Hence, the hypothesis cannot be supported. However, as a heuristic, the ellipsis-based analysis is informative with regard to the properties of the speech acts in question and points in the direction of an alternative approach to the grammatical analysis of verbless speech acts.