Procedural problems holding off illocutionary concerns

1.	System constraints not satisfied:
2.	"What did you say?"
3.	"Bitte, ich kann nur Deutsch sprechen."
4.	"What dime?"
5.	Ritual constraints not satisfied:
6.	"I'm sorry, we are not allowed to give out the time. Please phone TI 6-6666."
7.	"Nurse, can't you see I'm trying to tie off this bleeder?"
8.	"Shh, that mike carries."
9.	Addressing ritual presuppositions so that the illocutionary point of the initial statement is denied at least temporarily, and a side sequence is established in which the erstwhile respondent becomes the initiator:

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^44

Borrowed from Fillmore (1973:100), who not only provides some illustrations (in connection with his article's title), but also goes on to offer an injunction: We must allow ourselves, first of all, to disregard the infinite range of possible situations in which the sentence was mentioned or merely pronounced, rather than used. It may be that somebody was asked, for example, to pronounce four English monosyllables, putting heavy stress and rising intonation on the last one, and he accidentally came up with our sentence; or a speaker of a foreign language might have been imitating an English sentence he once overheard; or a librarian might have been reading aloud the title of a short story. Since the properties of this infinitely large range of possibilities are in no way constrained by the structure or meaning of this particular sentence, this whole set of possibilities can safely be set aside as an uninteresting problem. Here I think Fillmore is overdespairing, confusing members and classes. There is an unmanageable number of different ways a sentence can figure, but perhaps not so many classes of ways it can figure, and the delineation of these classes can be an interesting problem. That different students will be free to come up with different classes does not undermine the value of examining various attempts to see which seems currently the most useful.

-69-

Why the formality, love?"
"Could I ask where you learned your English?"
"Don't you remember me?"

Warranted or unwarranted treatment of asker's move as trickery--in this particular case the assumption being that once a claim is established for initiating talk, it will come to be exploited:

	"No." [Not meeting the asker's eyes and hurrying away from him on the assumption that the question might be an instance of the now standard ploy to ready a robbery]
	"Say, are you trying to pick me up?"
	"Never mind the time, Peterkins, you know you're supposed to be in bed."

Jointly sustained fabrication relative to passers-by; e.g.: [Spy recognition signal] "Yes. Do you happen to have a match?"

Unilateral use of features of interaction for the open purpose of play or derision:

	Failure to perform anticipated ellipsis:
	"Yes, I do...."
	Use of unanticipated schema of interpretation: "Yes, do you have the inclination?"
	[In mock Scots accent] "And may I ask what you want it for?"
	Anything covered in A through E but reframed for playful use, e.g.:
	[Huge, tough-looking black in black neighborhood, on being asked the time by a slight middle-class, white youth, looks into youth's eyes while reaching for watch] "You ain' fixin' to rob me, is you?"

It is some such framework of frameworks that we must seek out; it is some such metaschema that will allow us to accumulate systematic understanding about contexts, not merely warnings that in another context, meaning could be different.

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