Performative hypothesis

Rheme (述位): The constituent of a sentence that adds most new information, in addition to what has already been said in the discourse. The rheme is usually, but not always, associated with the subject.
What is literary discourse?
The framework of literary discourse of Keen (2003: 109), who argues ‘All narrative fiction has a discourse or textual level and a story world’, would be illustrated as in Figure 3:
Problem 2
• Ross proposed that the highest clause of the deepest phrase marker underlying a sentence is performative, no matter whether the surface sentence contained a lexical performative.
• I say (that) I promise to be home by eight. • The performative component I say is the highest clause, but the embedded performative I promise indicates the illocutionary point.
Problem 1
The practical problem with any analysis based on identifying explicit performatives is that, in principle, we simply do not know how many performative verbs there are in any language.
Example on literary discourse
• Ross’s approach sheds light on the fact that literary discourse is after all a communicative event between author (addresser) and reader (addressee). • The functionalist view clarifies the fact that a whole literary text is like one propositional clause in Ross’s framework in which the ‘sequence of elements in the clause tends to represent thematic ordering’ (Halliday 1967: 205), which could be represented as in Figure 2:
• According to Allan (1998:935), Ross was proved wrong for his hypothesis and also for his claim that a sentential phrase marker can contain not more than one performative. • Allan substantiates this rebuttal by means of the following example which dispels both of Ross’s claims:
End of the example
formative hypothesis
Advantages Disadvantages • It makes clear just what • Uttering the explicit elements are involved in performative version the production and sometimes has a much interpretation of more serious impact than utterances. uttering the implicit performative version. • Some adverbs such as ‘frankly’ in , or adverbial • It’s often difficult to know clauses ‘’naturally attach to exactly what the the explicit performative performative verb might be clause rather than the for some utterances. implicit version.
By supplying this structure with Ross’s framework (Figure 1) for the declarative sentence, it is possible to obtain Figure 4:
Does Figure 4 then sufficiently represent the literary discourse framework? The answer is negative. In actuality, literary communication is more like that in Figure 5.
Instead of trying to list all the possible explicit performatives, and then distinguish among all of them, some more general classifications of types of speech acts are usually used.
Performative hypothesis
Han Jiachen 201008005
Definition
• The performative hypothesis, brought forward by John Robert Ross (Ross 1970), is the hypothesis that every sentence is associated with an explicit illocutionary act, i.e. is derived from a deep structure containing a performative verb.
Conclusion
• In that sense, performative hypothesis is seldom used to make analysis at present.
Reference
• Yule, George. "Pragmatics." (1996): 201. • Kikuchi, Shigeo. "Performative Hypothesis of Literary Discourse.“ • Sassen, Claudia. Linguistic Dimensions of Crisis Talk: Formalizing Structures in a Controlled Language. Vol. 136. John Benjamins, 2005. • Vanderveken, Daniel, and Susumu Kubo, eds. Essays in speech act theory. Vol. 77. John Benjamins, 2002. • /index.php/Performative _hypothesis
Implicit performatives • A. Clean up this mess! • B. I order you that you clean up this mess! Explicit performatives
Ross’s performative analysis can be outlined as Figure 1: