Research Seminar: Bart Geurts “Commitments and speech acts”

Prof. Geurts will hold a talk at NegLaB’s research seminar, “Commitments and speech acts”. Our research seminar is held in room NG. 1.741b, Campus Westend, Goethe University Frankfurt and is streamed online on Zoom. To participate via Zoom, please reach out to Silvia Schaefer (si.schaefer@em.uni-frankfurt.de).

Please find the abstract below:

In a normative pragmatics, speech-act types are defined in terms of how they aim to affect the commitments of speakers and addressees, and therefore a general theory of speech acts will have to be built on a theory of commitments and commitment types. It is often held that commitments come in two main flavours, which are associated with distinct speech-act types: promising and asserting serve to negotiate action commitments and propositional commitments, respectively. This distinction is moot, partly because the former notion remains undertheorised, partly because opinions on the latter are divided, and partly because, arguably, all commitments are commitments to act. In this paper I develop the notion of agentive commitment and argue that the distinction between agentive/non-agentive commitments can do the same theoretical work as the action/propositional distinction, only better.