Performative updates and the modeling of speech acts

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Philosophy of Language
• Formal Semantics

Background:

• Traditional speech act theory lacks a dynamic semantic framework.
• Existing models do not fully capture the index-changing nature of performative utterances.
• The distinction between performative and informative updates requires formal modeling.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a dynamic semantic model for performative speech acts.
• To introduce and analyze the distinction between performative and informative updates.
• To provide a novel analysis of the performative marker 'hereby'.

Main Methods:

• Modeling performative speech acts within dynamic semantics.
• Introducing a distinction between performative (index-changing) and informative (index-filtering) updates.
• Analyzing index change implementations via functions or relations.

Main Results:

• Declarations are modeled as purely performative updates.
• Assertions are analyzed as combinations of performative and informative updates.
• Other speech acts (commissives, directives, etc.) are also modeled as performative.

Conclusions:

• The proposed dynamic semantic framework successfully models performative speech acts.
• The distinction between performative and informative updates provides a novel way to analyze speech acts.
• The analysis offers new insights into locutionary acts and the performative marker 'hereby'.