Re: THEORY: Are commands to believe infelicitous?

Hello, everyone in Conlang. While I was in Oklahoma I couldn't use my e-mail. Among
other consequences, I didn't know about rejected postings. Here is one of them.
I hope it is not too out of date.
--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Tim May <butsuri@M...> wrote:
> 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?
I don't know much about pragmatics either.  I may have gotten it
wrong.  Maybe somebody who actually has a textbook should go to the
definitions and find out what maxims are violated by an imperative
that cannot possibly be obeyed; and what you call such a violation,
if not "infelicitous".

> 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".
Thanks for the idea.  I look forward to seeing it.

> 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

Thanks very much for the reference.  When I get to a better computer
I will look it up.

-----

Tom H.C. in OK
(but I'm back home in MI now.)
Thanks, everyone.  Thanks, Tim.



		
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