ABSTRACT
Large parts of talking lives are spent doing four things: making claims on someone’s resources or credulity; concessions of such claims; denials; and retractions. Not all of these need actual talk. In Civil Society, even in its negotiable margins, much is transacted in silence. Nor does all talk appear to be of those four kinds. Some 103 to 104 of English verbs or phrase types designate usefully distinct ways of doing things with words. 1 Nevertheless, when all is said and done – asked, warned, baptized, etc. – there remains a suspicion: that much of it is, at the very least, defined against the backdrop of those first four.
