ABSTRACT
Wiggins and Kempson make great play with the fact that in English a contrast between the simple present and the progressive is not restricted to verbs capable of being used performatively. Wiggins appears to be putting forward what might be called the 'double duty' theory of performatives. That is to say, he does not deny that certain acts such as promising and warning. Katz and Postal claim that there was a 'Q' morpheme in the underlying phrase markers of interrogatives, and they described its function as follows: The Q morpheme indicates semantically only that the sentence is a question. Seamus O'Prattle's company could not possibly afford any pleasure whatsoever to the other members of the Irish Philosophical Association. Kempson appears to hold that successful performative utterances are indeed true. From which it would follow that to make a successful performative utterance by uttering a falsehood would be impossible.
