Subsentential Speech Acts: A Situated Contextualist Account

Subsentential speech acts are subsentential utterances by means of which one “makes moves in a language game”, i.a. asserts, requests, asks, etc. I’m going to propose a pragmatics-oriented account of such acts based on Recanati’s moderate relativism. Pace Recanati and following Perry, I’ll argue that at least in the case of subsentential speech acts we have to postulate unarticulated constituents in explicit contents as well as in the situations of evaluation. I’ll suggest a test which helps to determine which constituents belong where. I’ll also argue – somewhat paradoxically – that subsentential speech acts are not an argument in favour of contextualism in any interesting sense.