DOI: 10.1111/mila.70062 ISSN: 0268-1064

Non‐assertoric Moorean speech acts

Maciej Tarnowski

This paper offers a unified account of Moorean speech acts beyond assertion. While the knowledge norm of assertion provides a familiar explanation of Moorean assertions, it does not generalize easily to non‐assertoric cases. I argue that Stalnaker's model of common ground provides a suitable framework for explaining these phenomena. Speech acts propose updates to the common ground, understood as targeting common knowledge, involving both their satisfaction and sincerity conditions, and Moorean speech acts universally generate incompatible update proposals. The resulting account applies across speech act categories and explains characteristic patterns of conversational coordination and presupposition.

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