- Give reasons! - I’ll give reasons!

Someone kindly sent me a link from Dmitry Butrin (a commercial journalist and famous blogger): “May 3. Yes, by the way, I completely forgot. Friends and colleagues in the Administration of the President of the Russian Federation, who sent me an official invitation to the inauguration of V.V. Putin in the Kremlin in St. George's Hall on May 7, 2012! Despite all our differences, I am glad that we treat each other correctly and respectfully. Thankful for the invitation. Unfortunately, I don’t have the opportunity to accept it: I make an excuse by being busy and by my traditional non-participation in social life” ( www.facebook.com/irina.levontina/posts/408799385811857 ).

Here, of course, the whole point of this is to make an excuse.

The point is the remarkable property of some linguistic expressions, which J. Austin called performativity. A performative utterance is a utterance equivalent to an action. When uttering a performative, the speaker performs (rather than describes or names) an action. So, if a person says Congratulations! or I beg your pardon!, with these very statements he carries out the corresponding actions - congratulates or asks for forgiveness. If I say: Happy birthday to you, then the newborn can, of course, answer: Well, go ahead, congratulate you! - but only as a joke. If I say: Right now I’m congratulating my grandmother on her birthday, this, of course, is not performative, but ordinary, descriptive use. With this phrase I describe an action, not perform it. Naturally, the performative, being an action and not a message about an action, cannot receive a truth value. If I say I promise, you may not believe my promise, but you cannot refute it, you cannot say: No, you don’t promise at all! There are quite a lot of performatives in the language: well, for example: I declare the meeting open (or there I declare you husband and wife), I suggest you surrender, I support the previous speaker, We express our protest or We protest, I refuse! etc. Of course, the language here, as usual, is very whimsical and selective. For example, I really like the formula. I kindly ask you. That is, I’m not just asking, but I’m directly saying that I can do this very convincingly. Or it’s interesting: it’s okay to say I beg you! - but it’s impossible, I persuade you! That is, you can say this (for example, I have been persuading you for three hours already!), but this will not be an act of persuasion, while I am begging you - this is begging itself. And I beg you too, in no way.

So the verb to argue, of course, cannot be used performatively, which is why it was so funny in Kartsev and Ilchenko’s dialogue about an attempt to arrange a debate: - Argue! - I’ll give reasons! Actually, the language game in the example with which I started is based on the fact that I make an excuse by being busy looks like a performative, but it is not, and cannot, since the verb to dissuade assumes that a person refuses something under a plausible pretext, but in reality he just doesn’t want to do it. Therefore, to say: I don’t really want to, and therefore I refuse under a plausible pretext - this is what is called illocutionary suicide.

Naturally, in most cases performatives are verbs in the first person form. But this is not necessary, there are others: Passengers are asked to board; Can I ask you to close the window? etc. The performative use of the noun request is especially remarkable : The person who found the wallet is asked to hand it over to the watch. This is some kind of syntactic monster.

There are, however, quite complex cases. Here, for example, is the phrase I Give! is it in itself an act of giving? One of my friends once told me how her mother-in-law decided to give her her fur coat. I give it, he says. Well, what next? - I ask my friend. Nothing, he answers. In my opinion, to give is to put it in a bag and give it into your hands. Otherwise, I won’t take a fur coat from someone else’s closet. It should be noted, however, that when you don’t need to take it out of the closet and put it in a bag, you can tell Darya! It is quite enough for it to become a gift. For example: - Can I steal your joke? - I give! Or there: I give you this wonderful evening, this sky, this lake. And once upon a time there was a song: You will find out that it is in vain / They call the north extreme, / You will see - it is endless, / I give it to you. Quite performative.

And I still remember this story. One day a certain person approached me for a linguistic conclusion. He fooled me for a long time, puffed out his cheeks in every possible way, hinted at connections at the top (they say, Yuri Mikhalych and I), at the prospects for long-term cooperation, and I just repeated in a boring voice: “Well, let’s look at the text first.” Every time he said: “Yes, everything is clear with the text, I want you to understand the situation.” But finally I managed to insist on my own, and the text was presented. The essence of the matter was this: we supposedly have an agreement with them, but they say that the agreement has been terminated, although it has not been terminated at all. Here, they say, they refer to their letter, in which they wrote: “For such and such reasons, we consider the contract terminated.” So, he says, if they think so, then this is just their subjective opinion - but in reality there is no termination of the contract. Well, here I had to upset him, because in this case the phrase We consider the contract terminated, in fact, represents the act of terminating the contract, this is the same as We terminate the contract. So whether the counterparties had the right to terminate the contract unilaterally, whether they had such a right - this is how the contract was drawn up. Only the meaning of the verb to count has nothing to do with it. There was a terrible scandal, the failed client instantly moved from compliments and promises to threats and accusations of incompetence, and then finally left with the words “I will go higher!” Whatever this “higher” means, I never saw this man again. What I mean is that performative statements can await us in the most unexpected places.

Irina Levontina