Present conditional as a component of explicit performative formulae Cover Image

Kondicionál přítomný jako součást explicitních performativních formulí
Present conditional as a component of explicit performative formulae

Author(s): Magda Ševčíková
Subject(s): Language studies, Language and Literature Studies, Descriptive linguistics
Published by: AV ČR - Akademie věd České republiky - Ústav pro jazyk český
Keywords: conditional verb form; indicative verb form; explicit performative formulae; performa-tive usage of verbs; propositional content; verbs of appeal

Summary/Abstract: The present paper focuses on the form of the first person present conditional as a component of explicit performative formulae (EPF), which are considered to be a means directly expressing the communicative function of an utterance. We try to demonstrate that the performative usage of verbs is not limited to indicative forms of imperfective verbs in Czech, as usually stated, but that also the form of the first person present conditional of imperfective as well as perfective verbs is used as an ordinary component of EPF. In Section 2, basic characteristics of EPF are briefly described. Two groups of verbs (verbs of assertion and verbs of appeal) are examined on the basis of language data from two corpora: from the Prague Dependency Treebank 2.0 and SYN2005 corpus (Sect. 3). In Section 4, the performative function of the conditional forms of these verbs is attested by means of Austin’s test and by some other criteria de-scribed in theoretical works. We further examine how the propositional content is ex-pressed in analyzed utterances as well as what the difference between the examined EPF with the conditional verb form and the EPF with the indicative form is.

  • Issue Year: 2010
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 41-63
  • Page Count: 23
  • Language: Czech