ABSTRACT
Hypothesis developed by Ross (1968) to describe illocutionary forces within the framework of transformational grammar. On the basis of syntactic observations of declarative sentences, Ross attempted to derive all sentences from a unified deep structure that had one performative sentence as a matrix sentence (hypersentence), consisting of a subject (=first person)+a performative verb+an indirect object (=second person); the performative sentence, if need be, would be eliminated via deletion rules in the subsequent derivation of the uttered sentence. However, since the identity of speaker, addressee, and illocutionary force are dependent upon the given utterance situation, the performative analysis constitutes an (inadequate) syntacticization of pragmatic phe
nomena. For criticism of the performative analysis cf. Gazdar (1979). Sadock (1985) and McCawley (1985) have recently attempted to salvage the performative analysis, at least in part.
