Page 72 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

49 What Is Universal Pragmatics?

This difference notwithstanding, meanings acquired in a perfor-
mative attitude can, of course, also appear in sentences with prop-
ositional content:

8) “I assure you that he notified me yesterday that...”

9) “I’m reporting to you that he asked me yesterday
whether...”
This fact may explain why the indicated difference between the
two categories of meaning is often not noticed. In sentences of
propositional content, however, we can distinguish the meanings
of expressions that can be used in a performative attitude from
the word meanings that are permitted only as meaning com-
ponents of sentences with propositional content. In utterances
like (8) and (9), “notify” and ‘‘ask” bear a shade of meaning
borrowed from the power that they have only in illocutionary
roles—as in (6) and (7).
We can retain Austin’s distinction between force and meaning
in the sense of these two categories of meaning. Force then stands
for the meaning of expressions that are originally used in con-
nection with illocutionary acts, and meaning for the meaning of
expressions originally used in connection with propositions. Thus
we distinguish force and meaning as two categories of meaning
that arise in regard to the general pragmatic functions of the estab-
lishment of interpersonal relations, on the one hand, and the
re presentation of facts, on the other. (The third category of mean-
ing, which corresponds to the function of expresszon, that is, to
the disclosure of the speaker’s wishes, feelings, intentions, etc.
in first-person sentences, I shall leave to one side here, although
reflections similar to those carried through for illocutionary acts
apply to them as well.)
I would like to hold fast to the following results:
a. It is not advisable to reserve the concept of semantic content for
the propositional component of a speech action and to characterize the
meaning of the illocutionary component only by a pragmatic operator
(which designates a specific illocutionary force).
b. On the other hand, it is also unsatisfactory to reconstruct the
meaning of a performative sentence in exactly the same way as the