Illocutionary force beyond relativism: toward a processual-normative account

Abstract

This paper examines how to account for illocutionary force, with particular attention to situations in which speakers and hearers diverge in their attributions of force. Such cases raise the question of whether, and in what sense, a single utterance can have more than one illocutionary force. Standard intentionalist accounts reject this possibility, maintaining that each utterance has one correct force, fixed by the speaker’s intention. Interactional approaches, by contrast, make room for plural attributions by locating force in shared conventional procedures and their normative effects. A recent relativist account goes further, arguing that one and the same utterance may legitimately be assigned different illocutionary forces relative to different perspectives. My aim is to critically examine this relativist account and develop a processual-normative alternative. Drawing on conventionalist, interaction-based approaches, I argue that such relativism undermines the intersubjective normativity on which illocutionary force depends. If force is purely perspectival, it remains unclear how illocutionary acts could establish shared structures of rights and obligations that ground their normative efficacy. The processual-normative framework proposed here shows how illocutionary force takes shape through what I call illocutionary trajectories, as participants negotiate, adjust, and stabilize normative effects in interaction. In this way, the framework acknowledges the possibility of plural attributions of illocutionary force while avoiding the difficulties of the relativist account.