Re: THEORY: Are commands to believe infelicitous?

Tom Chappell wrote at 2005-05-25 17:52:52 (-0700)
 > Hi y'all.
 >
 > Some of you might be familiar with Grice, with Speech Act Theory,
 > and/or with Pragmatics.
 >
 > Some acts of speech may be felicitous, or infelicitous, depending
 > on whether or not, or which or how many of, certain "felicity
 > conditions" are satisfied.
 >
[...]
 >
 > Imperatives are usually not felicitous if they cannot be obeyed.
 > If one person commands another to turn green immediately, this is
 > not felicitous, because people cannot change color so fast or so
 > drastically, and green is not one of the colors people can change
 > to.  Even commanding a chameleon to turn green may be considered
 > infelicitous, because a chameleon's chromatophores are under
 > unconscious, not conscious, control.

Forgive my ignorance - I don't know that much about pragmatics - but
it's not clear to me why felicity conditions are important with
respect to imperatives (as they clearly are with performatives like "I
now pronounce you...").  What consequences does it have,
linguistically, if a command is infelicitous in this sense?

That said, I think I basically agree with you that believing, in what
I feel to be the core sense of the term, is not something that a
person can be ordered to do under normal circumstances.  (An exception
- not involving anything other than natural humans - might be when
someone is under hypnosis.)

In my never-fully-worked-out conlang LC-01, imperative morphology can
only apply to agentive verbs, which are in turn all derived by means
of "causative" affixes.  In this language, the closest one could come
to a command to "believe" would be closer, literally, to "cause
yourself to believe", perhaps with a sense along the lines of
"convince yourself".


tomhchappell wrote at 2005-05-27 03:07:23 (-0000)
 >
 > I'm very interested in evidentials, which I think should be regarded
 > as a branch of epistemic modality.  I hadn't thought of them as part
 > of this question.

I read a dissertation once which I think might interest you.  It's on
evidentiality in Tibetan, and performatives and their felicity
conditions come up more than once.

http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/general/dissertations/GarrettEdwardDissertationUCLA2001.pdf

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