performative hypothesis (was: RE: kau, take 2

["And Rosta" <a.rosta@lycos.co.uk>]

Nick:
> The linguists in the audience will at this point grimace at the 
> performatives. (That's the assumption that any sentence X can be 
> paraphrased as "I say X" or "I know X".) The performative hypothesis 
> was big in the early '70s, and blew up spectacularly by the end of the 
> decade. I don't remember how, which is why I'm using it. :-)

It blew up because the whole Generative Semantics enterprise blew
up, and that blew up partly because in those days people had (like
John! ;) a much weaker grasp of the semantics--pragmatics distinction,
so were trying to formalize too much, and mainly because the
syntactic rules from semantic representation = Deep Structure
to Surface Structure seemed far too arbitrary and unconstrained.
However, without acknowledgement, Generative Semantics has returned 
to life in the last decade, in TG, in a more constrained form, and
even the Performative Hypothesis finds a modern incarnation in
Mood Phrases and Force Phrases propounded most notably by Luigi
Rizzi. Finally, I myself am convinced that the logic of sentences
cannot adequately be captured without a certain variety of the 
Performative Hypothesis.

--And.