On unsuccessful utterances in pragmatics

Abstract

One of the goals of classical, philosophy-oriented pragmatics studies is to postulate some pragmatic conditions by which we can evaluate a given utterance as successful or not, like the truth conditions by which we can evaluate a given sentence (proposition) as true or not. Speech Act Theory presents a number of felicity/successful conditions as such, while the interaction of the Cooperative Principle and meaningNN (nonnatural meaning) is supposed to do the job in Grice's system. The present paper investigates a type of unsuccessful utterance (which I call an emotionally unsuccessful utterance) that seems to have escaped serious attention thus far. My goal is to show that emotionally unsuccessful utterances are properly accounted for by Grice's system but not by Speech Act Theory (nor by post-Gricean pragmatics and dynamic semantics). Grice's system differs from the others in that a successful utterance is defined not directly in terms of its semantic content but indirectly in terms of the audience response intended by the speaker. I conclude the paper by putting its findings into a wider theoretical perspective.