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To cite this article: Charles J. Fillmore (1969) Verbs of judging: An exercise in semantic description, Paper in Linguistics, 1:1,
91-117, DOI: 10.1080/08351816909389109
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91
Charles J. Fillmore
Ohio State University
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Preliminaries
speaker before the utterance and in the head of the hearer after the
forms.
for the reason that there is no way of knowing whether the images
form means, I tell you something about when people have used it
and vhat happened after they did, I'm not telling you what the
form means, I'm asking you to figure out for yourself what it
theorists have proclaimed it; but most of us have simply not heard
associated culture, rather than with facts of the type that are
tions we can discover that the word wolf has the feature 'Physical
violation. Thus, from the fact that both (It) and (5) are semanti-
phrase requires a 'Human' subject, the noun wolf has the feature
sentence is odd in the intended sense, this unclarity has a lot more
wolves than with what we, as speakers of English, know about the
appropriately and to understand other people when they use it? ',
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tut rather, 'What is the meaning of this form?'. And having asked
we can merely take over and turn instantly to our own use, I believe
with words speak of there being rules for the use of words, and
into utterances; but these philosophers would deny that one can
knight in a game of chess ; but it does not always make sense to ask
speaker's part,
open,
from the fact that the form of the sentence is imperative, we infer
the same conditions hold about the door being identifiable, about
its being now open, and about the relations between speaker and
hearer. The only one that changes is the one about the speaker
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the totality of such conditions, but only with those that can be
to every speech communication act, and do not have any special part
that some state of affairs has been wrongly described, or that one
98
of the speech act that takes into account the presuppositional and
responsibility.
Verbs of Judging
Affected.
the Defendant.10
lity for the Situation, or vho makes a statement about such matters;
not of the utterance which contains the verbs we are examining, but
of the speech act which these verbs might refer to. Where needed,
John had written an obscene letter to Mary, and then told her
In each of these cases John is the Defendant and Mary the Affected.
the verbs differ in various syntactic ways. For example, the phrase
marked off with the preposition on_. Thus we can say either (l8) or
(21).
The words criticize and scold agree in that they can function
(23)
(22) She criticized him.
the nature of the offense is known from the context, but they
The words justify and excuse have much wider uses than I am
able to discuss here, but we can limit our attention to their use
presented the Judge and 'X' as the two complements of THINK, with
of these verbs there can be found one or more formulas that capture
having these items as their main verbs. The content of the pre-
represented as the word 'GOOD' having, after it, the word 'Situation'
'Situation1.
criticize.
105
the letter, and I'm telling you that John said Harry did it. If I
say (36),
I presuppose that Harry wrote the letter, and I'm telling you that
John said that Harry's having written the letter was blameworthy.
to by the other. ^
indicating expression that does not have its ovn existence pre-
to my mother.
sentence with this verb in its first person present tense form has
mative verb, and what this means is that performances of sentence (1(0)
I can criticize Harry to his face or behind his back, but I cannot
scold him behind his back. The following is the lexical entry for
scold.
107
Thus, a sentence like (kl) sounds more natural than either (1*2) or
(1*3).
bad taste.
saying 'He blamed me', that he had said something to somebody. This
It is this use of the verb that one would find in the following
situation. Harry wrote the letter himself, and then he gave people
with the presupposition that the Defendant was not the responsible
the Addressee of the Judge's statement, and the Judge is not the
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blame that one can blame oneself. Otherwise, blame has much in
19
common with accuse. '
The other two verbs blame are not linguistic-act verbs, but
accuse respectively.
This ambiguity of blame, that is, the division of blame into blameg
what I'm telling you is that John for some reason regarded my action
sentence (1*5).
particular letter, and vhat I'm telling you is that John felt
That is blame,.21
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sible, but where one wishes to say that the action was not really
this deed was part of some larger endeavor that is essentially good.
This description does not tell the whole story. One very
in both cases, there is some reason for believing what the Judge
for it.
With the vords apologize and forgive, however, both of these shov
I am presupposing both that Harry vrote the letter and that there
vas something bad about his doing that; and I make exactly the same
but with BAD replaced by GOOD, whether there are in the system of
fill out or extend the system I have proposed (there are a great
here); and thirdly, to what extent the concepts that have proved
Appendix
Footnotes
15. I use the word SAY in the entries, but it should be under-
stood that the symbolic act in question can be carried out in other
ways besides speaking out loud.
References
308.
Dordrecht, Reidel.
Heidelberg.
Düsseldorf.