Conventional speech act formulae: from corpus findings to formalization

Our aim is to provide an account of illocutionary force which allows the conventionalized formulae to be regarded as interpretive shortcuts (as first described by Morgan 1978). That is, we assume that the use of a formula in a given context guides the hearer to a particular interpretation, but that that interpretation could potentially have been reached by full inference about the speaker’s desires and so on. Nevertheless, the use of a conventional formula by a speaker can be assumed to make an intended illocutionary force clearer to the hearer, perhaps disambiguating intentions. Under this assumption, the conventional illocutionary force of utterances is represented separately from the compositional semantics. The conventional illocutionary force does not replace part of the compositional interpretation, as it might on an idiom theory of speech acts, but rather adds to it, thus licensing dual responses (cf. Clark 1979, Clark and Schunk 1980).