Abstract

This paper is part of a series of interdisciplinary investigations in literary fiction and aims to identify the illocutionary force of the so-called “non-serious utterance” of fiction makers on the theoretical assumption that the primary unit of an utterance’s meaning are complete speech acts, composed of an illocutionary force and a propositional content. Based on philosophical analysis of non-serious and performative utterances of descriptive sentences, I formulate the fundamental hypothesis that the primary unit of non-serious utterances’ meaning is a complete declaration of the form F, whose illocutionary point is to create the extra-linguistic event represented in the propositional content of this speech act, in virtue of the linguistic meaning determined by the social conventions of fiction.