Abstract
Recent literature has seen a quickening of interest in ways of domesticating illocutionary force in semantic terms. One line of thought takes inspiration from Chierchia and McConnell Ginet (Meaning and Grammar, 2000) who influentially distinguished between sentential force and utterance force. Recently Murray and Starr ("The Structure of Communicative Acts", Linguistics & Philosophy, 2020) have argued on empirical and methodological grounds for a treatment of the former as a phenomenon amenable to analysis in terms of compositional dynamic semantics. If successful, Murray and Starr will have strengthened the case for treating (one aspect of force) in semantic terms. Another strategy conceives of force as represented semantically within declarative sentences. Van Elswyck ("Representing Knowledge", Philosophical Review, 2021) for instance argues that declaratives host a covert parenthetical, "I know", and uses this hypothesis to explain why assertions represent the speaker as knowing the proposition asserted. In this talk I will set forth both Murray and Starr's and Van Elswyck's approaches, and argue that neither is successful.
