Linguaggio e azione. La dinamica dell’atto linguistico tra performance e ricezione

The question of the performativity of language, starting from the original formulation by J. L. Austin (cf. Austin 1962), has been and still is at the centre of reflections that have shown its fruitfulness in various fields of investigation. First identified as a distinctive element of "performative utterances" (whose utterance constitutes the execution of the act expressed by the verb and not simply its description; consider the celebrated examples of promising, wagering and baptising), performativity was later recognised by Austin as a characteristic of "speech acts" in general, capable of producing new states of affairs provided a series of conditions are met. This perspective had the merit of focusing on the action potential of language. The literature after Austin assigned a key role to the speaker’s intention (think of the centrality of the Gricean notion of speaker’s meaning in the Searlian framework, cf. Searle 1969) and the mental states that accompany the utterance. More recently, authors have turned their gaze to the notion of uptake and interpretation of the speech act by the audience. Moving within this theoretical framework, this article aims to articulate the contribution that the speaker’s intention and the listener’s uptake play in the performance of a linguistic act. Attention to the issue of interpretation-uptake (not reducible to the recognition of the speaker’s intention) will shed light on the bilateral character of linguistic acts and the role of intersubjective agreement and recognition (cf. Sbisà 1989).