Sincerity Condition Revisited: Truth or Dare?

摘要

Some speech acts, such as apologizing and thanking, involve psychological states of the speaker. The relationships between the speech acts and the corresponding psychological states have been explained under the label of "sincerity condition" (Searle 1969, 1979). The sincerity condition is a condition such that, if the speaker is sincere (IF SS) in doing the speech act, the condition is supposed to be satisfied. In this talk, I will attempt to investigate what is really meant by the sincerity condition. I will particularly focus on that aspect of the sincerity condition that delivers the information that satisfies the sincerity condition with the IF SS condition. Using examples of apology, I will claim that how the prosody in apology signals the sincerity condition and how the hearer judges it involve both natural and non-natural meanings (Grice 1957).