The Fulfillment of Felicity Conditions in Speech Acts in Winfrey’s Speech Learn from Every Mistake

This study was about fulfilling felicity conditions in speech acts in Winfrey's speech Learn from Every Mistake. This research analyzed each utterance spoken by Winfrey’s speech entitled Learn from Every Mistake. Each utterance is categorized based on five types of speech acts. The felicity of the utterance was analyzed based on Searle's felicity condition theory. This study was a qualitative case study. The research object was Winfrey’s speech entitled Learn from Every Mistake published on YouTube on 18th May 2019. The findings showed that all the utterances in five types of speech act fulfilled the felicity conditions. The consideration came when the utterances were in a joke which meant that the speaker did not sincerely utter the utterances. There was a note when utterances in a joke were felicitous if both the speaker and the hearers truly understood that the utterance was a joke. The last conclusion in felicity condition was in the essential speech act. Based on the analysis, all of the utterances in Winfrey's speech entitled Learn from Every Mistake were felicitous in essential condition. The research finding can be used as a reference in understanding felicity conditions in the speech act.

“Please Don’t Come Back”: A Pragmatic Study of Chinese Netizens’ Complaints Under Pandemic of COVID-19

This article aims to analyze Chinese netizens’ speech act of complaints under pandemic of COVID-19 by Searl’s felicity condition of speech act (1969) and discuss with politeness theories. Researchers collected data from the comment area of a short video on Douyin in September 2021. The result shows that there are 11 strategies employed to complain about the returnees, namely Suggestion, Statement, Order, Irony, Expectation, Expressing negative emotions, Request, Criticism, Asking for reasons, Calling for empathy, and Exclaiming strategies according to the order of most to least. In uneasy situations, Chinese speakers still try to employ polite strategies to express their dissatisfaction, however, they may threaten listeners’ “face” inevitably.

Analysis of Jokowi’s Commissive Speech Acts in 2014 and 2019 Inaugural Address: A Pragmatic Study

This article attempted to identify and describe the commissive acts in the inaugural addresses delivered by the Indonesian president Joko Widodo in 2014 and 2019. This includes the felicity condition of the addresses. The differences between commissive speech acts produced in his inauguration address and the second terms were also contrasted. The data were the transcripts of the addresses in both terms. Descriptive qualitative was implied in this study. The results found that there were two categories of commissive acts in the first term and four in the second term. In contrast with the first term which was only 11, in his second term he uttered 15 commissive acts. The results concluded that to maintain people’s trust in his second term, the speaker proposed more commissive acts than in the first term.

Factive islands from necessary blocking

Oshima (2007) and Schwarz & Simonenko (2018a) credit the unacceptabilityof so-called factive islands to necessary infelicity – the violation of someor other felicity condition on (wh-)questions in all accessible contexts. We applythis analysis to new types of factive islands – in wh-questions with if any and inmultiple wh-questions – and argue that they pose challenges for an analysis in termsof necessary infelicity. We propose that factive islandhood can be understood asdue to necessary blocking: in all accessible contexts where such a question wouldotherwise be felicitous, the speaker would have had to use a different, more suitable,question instead. We show that the necessary blocking analysis applies correctly toboth classic factive islands and to the new types that we have identified.

Felicity Conditions of the Speech Acts in Banyumasan Daily Conversation

A truth conditional sentence requires a sentence to fit into the world; however, it cannot be applied pragmatically in a daily conversation, consequently, non-truth conditional sentence is applied. In pragmatics filed, an utterance needs to be felicitous, thus it has to meet the felicity condition. Felicity condition underlies that in order to be felicitous an utterance must meet the felicity condition that includes preparatory condition, propositional content, sincerity condition, and essential condition. By using felicity condition, speakers can mean what they say and say what they mean. Searle has only postulated the felicity condition for directive and commisives, thus this article attempts to complete the felicity conditions of another three speech acts. The utterances are taken from Banyumas dialect or Banyumasan; it is a dialect of standard Javanese spoken along Serayu River. It has unique characteristic due to its phonological and lexical items compared to Standard Javanese spoken in Yogyakarta and Surakarta. This article describes the felicity condition of the speech acts found in Banyumasan daily conversation which is conducted by using descriptive analysis. The finding of this research shows that felicity conditions of Banyumasan are realized into representative, directives, commisives, expressive, and declarations.

Rejecting and challenging illocutionary acts

This paper examines aspects of strategic interaction and the construction of the social actor in a neo-Austinian framework of illocutionary acts. The basic premise of the neo-Austinian framework is conventionality, according to which illocutionary acts depend on social agreement. An important part of the framework is the felicity condition of entitlement, directly related to the hearer’s understanding of the conventions that should hold for an act performance. Two strategies of challenging and/or rejecting illocutionary acts are then identified tentatively dubbed looping and backfiring, related to the hearer’s perception of when the entitlement felicity condition is flouted. Both strategies can be overtly or covertly confrontational and demonstrate that in their social quality illocutionary acts serve to construct the social actor and build up interpersonal relations.

The expression of exhaustivity and scalarity in Burmese

The Burmese particle hma expresses exhaustivity in some contexts but a scalar, even-like meaning in other contexts. We detail the distribution of hma and its meaning and develop a unified semantics. Hma is a not-at-issue scalar exhaustive, similar to the semantics proposed for English it-clefts in Velleman, Beaver, Destruel, Bumford, Onea & Coppock 2012. When hma takes wide scope, it leads to an exhaustive, cleft interpretation which is not scale-sensitive. When hma takes scope under negation, the resulting meaning will have a scale-sensitive felicity condition. We also discuss the semantics of the sentence-final mood marker dar, which we propose is a marker of propositional clefts (Sheil 2016), and its apparent role in the determination of the scope of hma.

French future: Exploring the future ratification hypothesis

ABSTRACTThe paper proposes a unified account of the systematic polysemy of French future (FUT) that does not uniquely rely on Aktionsart. It explains the predominant preference for the temporal interpretation of FUT, appealing to the ‘future ratification hypothesis’. This is a felicity condition that can be satisfied to different degrees and among competing interpretations the one that satisfies it to the highest degree is preferred. The paper also shows that FUT does not convey uncertainty at utterance time (tu), and can be used when the attitude holder knows attuthat the embedded proposition is true.

Renhed, ritual og samfund hos Mary Douglas

“Purity, Ritual and Society According to Mary Douglas: A problematization inspired by some recent post-structuralist critiques”. Mary Douglas’ two pioneering books, Purity and Danger and Natural Symbols, were together a major break-through in the study of religions. Today, when post-structuralist voices are heard more and more clearly, also in this discipline, it is, however, time for a rethinking of her hypotheses. The present article attempts particularly to account for two such critiques. One is the objection against the linguistic paradigm and specially against its separation between thought and act, meaning and ritual. On the basis of the criticisms of Talal Asad, Catherine Bell and others (and referring back to philosophy of language) purity is instead seen as a felicity condition of ritual action, practice or agency. The other critique is based on phenomenology of perception and is directed at the fundamental distinction in Douglas’ social symbolism between an undifferentiated experience and a conceptual ordering. This distinction is a misrepresentation of Gestalt psychology according to Ariel Glucklich who, instead, develops a phenomenological definition of purity as ‘resonance’ between the ritual’s mythical narrative and the sensory experience of its performance.

There is no Fallacy of Arguing from Authority

I argue that there is no fallacy of argument from authority. I first show the weakness of the case for there being such a fallacy: text-book presentations are confused, alleged examples are not genuinely exemplary, reasons given for its alleged fallaciousness are not convincing. Then I analyse arguing from authority as a complex speech act. Rejecting the popular but unjustified category of the "part-time fallacy", I show that bad arguments which appeal to authority are defective through breach of some felicity condition on argument as a speech act, not through employing a bad principle of inference.