The present paper focuses on the form of the first person present conditional as a component of explicit performative formulae (EPF), which are considered to be a means directly expressing the communicative function of an utterance. We try to demonstrate that the performative usage of verbs is not limited to indicative forms of imperfective verbs in Czech, as usually stated, but that also the form of the first person present conditional of imperfective as well as perfective verbs is used as an ordinary component of EPF. In Section 2, basic characteristics of EPF are briefly described. Two groups of verbs (verbs of assertion and verbs of appeal) are examined on the basis of language data from two corpora: from the Prague Dependency Treebank 2.0 and SYN2005 corpus (Sect. 3). In Section 4, the performative function of the conditional forms of these verbs is attested by means of Austin’s test and by some other criteria described in theoretical works. We further examine how the propositional content is expressed in analyzed utterances as well as what the difference between the examined EPF with the conditional verb form and the EPF with the indicative form is.
The paper argues in favour of the Searlean internalist way of construing the content of thoughts and communicative acts. As interpreted by the author, it reflects the participation of external factors in the determination of content (stressed by externalists like Burge, Putnam, Kripke and Davidson) but it does so in a way which enables to approach the thinking and communicating individual as a real subject of his acts. The crucial move is to incorporate the individual’s reliance on the relevant parameters of his physical or social environment into the construal of the content itself. Then the external factors can be treated as exploited by the individual himself in the articulation of his acts, rather than as intervening into the content through the gaps marked by indexicals, proper names, natural kind terms or concepts borrowed from the communal repertoire. In particular with respect to the last factor the author proposes a maxim of interpretation which he labels as The principle of maximization of subjectivity and regards as a pendant of the well-known Principle of charity., Příspěvek argumentuje ve prospěch Searleanova internacionalistického způsobu interpretace obsahu myšlenek a komunikačních aktů. Jak interpretuje autor, odráží účast externích faktorů na určování obsahu (zdůrazněno externisty jako Burge, Putnam, Kripke a Davidson), ale dělá to způsobem, který umožňuje přistupovat k myšlení a komunikovat jednotlivce jako skutečný jeho aktů. Rozhodujícím krokem je začlenit závislost jednotlivce na relevantních parametrech jeho fyzického nebo sociálního prostředí do konstrukčního obsahu samotného. Externí faktory pak mohou být považovány za vykořisťované jednotlivcem samotným v artikulaci jeho činů, spíše než jako zasahování do obsahu skrze mezery označené rejstříky, vlastními jmény, termíny přirozené povahy nebo koncepty vypůjčené ze společného repertoáru. Zejména s ohledem na poslední faktor autor navrhuje zásadu interpretace, kterou označuje jako zásadu maximalizace subjektivity a vnímá jako přívěsek známého principu lásky., and Petr Koťátko