Embedding Illocutionary Acts

Abstract

Speech acts have sometimes been considered as not embeddable, for principled reasons. In this paper, I argue that illocutionary acts can be embedded under certain circumstances. I provide for a semantic interpretation of illocutionary acts as functions from world/time indices to world/time indices, which provides them with a semantic type, and allows for operators that take them as arguments. I will illustrate this with three cases: First, with illocutionary acts as arguments of verbs like tell, second, as semantic objects modified by speech act adverbials like frankly and third, with Austinian conditionals. By these exemplary cases, I show that illocutionary acts (or rather, speech-act potentials) become part of the recursive structure of language.