Abstract The concept of common ground has proved to be invaluable for many linguistic purposes, for the explication of, among other things, presupposition, implicature cancellation, and discourse entailments. It has been hoped that speech acts could be characterized purely in terms of context change, with assertions adding beliefs, promises, commitments, and so forth, to the common ground. But consideration shows that our current concepts of common ground are very under-developed. Moreover, the different types of speech act are very diverse and culturally variable. Most important, speech acts are properly construed as a species of action, and the common ground as a set of propositions merely records the current score or state of play. The idea then arises of supplementing the context change theory of speech acts with an Austinian overlay. But the Austinian concept of speech act is too atomistic, too ungrounded in the empirical study of conversation, and doesn’t accord with the larger plan-motivated unfolding of discourse, due to its action characteristics. The paper concludes that while a better theory of common ground is highly desirable, it will not alone offer a theory of speech acts.
Stephen C. Levinson (Wed,) studied this question.