Mark Jary is currently a María Zambrano Research Fellow at the Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies in the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). He is also Emeritus Professor in Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Roehampton (London, UK), where he taught Linguistics and Philosophy of Language for over 20 years. He received his PhD in Linguistics from University College London and has written extensively on subjects relating to linguistic mood, speech acts and associated topics. As well as articles in journals such as Mind and Language and Linguistics and Philosophy, he has published three books: Assertion (Palgrave, 2010), Imperatives (CUP, 2014 – co-authored with Mikhail Kissine) and Nothing is Said (OUP, 2022).  Abstract: What is what is said? The models of utterance interpretation that we build will be determined to a significant extent by how we characterise linguistic communication. The dominant characterisation sees linguistic communication as a case of saying something and thereby conveying both what is said and something extra. Given this characterisation, a model of linguistic communication is required to have what is said as an output of the process of interpretation, or of some sub-part of this. In this talk, I present an alternative characterisation of utterances in terms of pairs of situation types linked by a situation-theoretic constraint (in the sense of Barwise and Perry, 1983). Because this characterisation makes no mention of saying, any appeal to what is said in a model of linguistic communication must be independently motivated. Building on ideas developed in Nothing is Said (OUP, 2022), I will suggest that such motivation is not readily available, and that we are better off thinking of what is said as a second-order reflective category, rather than as a fundament of linguistic communication.   Topic: ECOM Speaker Series: Prof. Mark Jary Time: Sep 27, 2024 04:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada) Join Zoom Meeting https://uconn-edu.zoom.us/j/91377026240?pwd=mVwH20DYeEJCa6nq85bRegvEAjGxUI.1 Meeting ID: 913 7702 6240 Passcode: 112917

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