De se attitudes in discourse

Abstract

AbstractDe se attitudes have been regarded as a semantic issue. By utilizing Austin’s idea of the expositive illocutionary act, and Austin's distinction of four types of illocutionary act performed by the utterance “I is a T,” the present paper presents a speech-act-theoretic model of expressing a belief according to which the belief of a speaker is brought to the discourse as the belief of the performer of an expositive illocutionary act type. De se attitudes are brought to the discourse when the inner self of a speaker is perceived from the perspective of the performer of an expositive illocutionary act type, and specified discursively through the acts of this type.