tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Referring as Requesting"

Searle [14] has a r g , e d forcefully that referring is a speech act; that people refer, uot just expressions. This paper considers what kind of speech act referring might be. I propose a generalization of Searle's "propositional" act of referring that treats it as an illocutionary act, a request, and argue that the propositional act of referring is unnecessary. The essence of the argument is as follows: First, I consider Searle's definition of the propositional act of referring {which I term the PAA, for Propositional Act Account). . | Referring as Requesting Philip R. Cohen Artificial Intelligence Center SRI International and Center for the Study of Language and Information Stanford University 1. Introduction1 Searle 114 has argued forcefully that referring is a speech act that people refer not just expressions. This paper considers what kind of speech act referring might be. I propose a generalization of Searle s propositional act of referring that treats it as an illocutionary act. a request and argue that the propositional act of referring is unnecessary. The essence of the argument is as follows First I consider Searle s definition of the propositional act of referring which I term the PAA for Propositional Act Account . This definition is found inadequate to deal with various utterances in discourse used for the sole purpose of referring. Although the relevance of such utterances to the propositional act has been defined away by Searle it is clear that any comprehensive account of referring should treat them. 1 develop an account of their use in terms of a speaker s requesting the act of referent identification which is to be understood in a perceptual sense. This illocutionary act analysis IAA is shown to satisfy Searle s conditions for referring yet captures utterances that the PAA cannot. The converse position is then examined Can the IAA capture the same uses of referring expressions as the PAA If one extends the perceptually-based notion of referent identification to include Searle s concept of identification then by associating a complex propositional attitude to one use of the definite determiner a request can be derived. The IAA thus handles the referring use of definite noun phrases with independently motivated rules. Referring becomes a kind of requesting. Hence the propositional act of referring is unnecessary. 2. Referring as a propositional speech act Revising Austin s 2 iocutionary illocutionary dichotomy Searle distinguishes between illocutionary acts IAs and propositional .