Performatives and aspect: A cross-linguistic study
Performatives are notionally/conceptually special in that they involve illocutionary acts that can be performed simply “by uttering a sentence containing an expression that names the type of speech act” (Searle 1989: 536) (e.g. I cancel the meeting).A grammatical reflex of this in English is that performatives, unlike canonical present-time event reports, feature the simple present rather than the present progressive (cf. *I talk right now versus I promise to quit). Assuming a perfective aspectual value for the English simple present, this is indeed remarkable: in English as well as cross-linguistically, present-time events cannot normally be reported by means of perfective constructions (De Wit forthcoming). However, these observations about English performatives cannot readily be extended to other languages: Slavic languages, for one, hardly ever use perfective aspect in performative contexts(Dickey 2000).
In this study we unveil the aspectual characteristics of performatives in a typologically diverse sample of languages. We thereby hypothesize that there is not one single aspectual construction (e.g., perfectives) that is systematically reserved for performative contexts. Instead, we assume that with performative utterances, a language uses the aspectual construction that it generally selectsto refer tosituations that are fully identifiable as an instance of a given situation type at the time of speaking.In other words, this analysis presumes a common epistemic meaning with every use of a certain aspectual construction. Thus, whatever the exact value of a given aspect marker, if it is used to mark performatives, then we also expect it to feature in the expression of states and habits, which have the subinterval property (they can be fully verified on the basis of any random segment), sports broadcasting, demonstrationsand other special construals of more or less predictable and therefore instantly identifiable events. This general formulation holds for English, but also for those languages which do not resort to perfective performative constructions.
Building on Dahl (1985), we have developed a questionnaire that allows us to identify the range of aspectual distinctions made in individual languages and determine which aspectual constructions are employed in various types ofcontexts, including performative uses and contexts that share epistemic features with performatives. In total, we have collected data from 16 divergent languages. The data have been analyzed using Croft & Poole’s (2008) method of multidimensional scaling, which enables us to measure to which extent contexts of use (e.g. states, performatives) are similar in the sense that they often receive the same formal expression.
Our findings confirm our expectation that different languages can use different aspectual constructions in performative contexts, be they perfective or imperfective. In addition, most languages show clear signs of “clustering” along the expected lines: in a large majority of our questionnaire items, the form used for performatives is also the one used for the expression of present states, habits and other contexts that involve fully identifiable events. It is the shared epistemic motivation behind each of these uses that is responsible for the systematic selection of one aspect marker (over others) in such contexts.
Croft, WilliamKeith Poole. 2008. Inferring universals from grammaticalvariation: Multidimensional scaling for typological analysis. Theoretical Linguistics34.1-37.
Dahl, Östen. 1985. Tense and Aspect Systems. Oxford: Blackwell.
De Wit, Astrid. forthcoming. The Present Perfective Paradox across Languages. Oxford: OUP.
Dickey,Stephen. 2000. Parameters of Slavic Aspect: A Cognitive Approach. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Searle, John. 1989. How performatives work. Linguistics and Philosophy12.535-558.