Speech act conditionals in two works of Cicero: In Verrem and Ad Atticum

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to elucidate how the protasis of speech act conditionals can be understood either as the explicitation of one of Grice’s conversational maxims or as one of Searle’s felicity conditions. Due to the theoretical framework that I have decided to use, I call these conditionals “speech act conditionals”, but these same sentences can be called “pseudo-conditionals” (Pinkster), “illocutionary conditionals” (Martín, Wakker). The theory presented here will be applied to examples taken mostly from two works of Cicero: In Verrem and Ad Atticum with the addition of occurrences from other works of Cicero.

Keywords

• speech act
• conversational maxim
• felicity condition
• pseudo-conditional