QUESTION-073: Are teasing and reproach individuated by the speaker's communicative intention, or partly by a frame the parties sustain together and by their standing?

Why it is a question

CLAIM-151 says which act an utterance performs is partly constituted by its relations to participant roles, norms and expected uptake. For acts with standing conditions, such as a judge’s reprimand, the record has an account it has read: Searle’s status functions and deontic powers (LIT-482). Teasing is the line’s central case, and for it the record has no account at all.

CLAIM-221 names the standard rival. On the intention-based account of illocution (Grice’s speaker meaning, 1957; Strawson’s “Intention and Convention in Speech Acts”, 1964; Bach and Harnish’s Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts, 1979), an act is individuated by the speaker’s communicative intention, an intention to be recognized as having a certain attitude or aim. On it the friend teasing and the parent reproaching differ in what each intends the hearer to recognize, and their relations to the audience are evidence of the act, not part of it. The record’s own model for CLAIM-111 is of this family: THEORY-172’s listener interprets an utterance “by inverting a model of a speaker”.

The tradition has replies, and the record holds none of them read.

• Keying. Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1974) treats play as a keying of a frame, a transformation of serious activity that the participants recognize and sustain together. If teasing is keyed play, whether an utterance teases depends on whether the frame is jointly held, not only on what the speaker intends. The book is not in the record; Forms of Talk (LIT-780) is held unread.
• Uptake. Austin held that an illocution is not performed unless uptake is secured (LIT-785, held unread). If so, the hearer’s recognition is a condition of the act, not only evidence of it.

CLAIM-224 adds the translation form of the question: a translation changes the audience and the norms, so whether teasing survives depends on whether the target culture’s norms define the same roles.

What would count as an answer

A reading of the intention-based line and of its rivals, and a documented or elicited case in which the speaker’s intention is held fixed and the act verdicts of informed participants change with the parties’ standing, with whether the frame is jointly held, or with uptake. Such a case would show that teasing is partly constituted by relations, and CLAIM-151 would cover it. A body of cases in which the verdicts follow the speaker’s intention whatever the standing and uptake would show the reverse, and CLAIM-151 would hold only for acts with standing conditions.

The works named here should be checked against the Anthology of the SOTA before any is filed.

Note of 2026-10-10: a documented case

CASE-069, Labov’s recorded sounding sessions, is the first documented case this question asks for. Whether a pejorative remark about the hearer’s relative is a sound (ritual insult) or a personal insult follows a relation the parties sustain together. A sound needs it to be shared knowledge before the audience that the remark is untrue; Labov states this as his rule. The words can be the same, and in the recorded exchanges the act changes while the speaker’s ritual aim, as Labov attributes it, stays fixed. The Crow and Hidatsa joking-relative adds standing: the same reproof is licensed from a maku’tsati and an offence from anyone else.

What it supplies: documented, non-institutional data in which teasing’s nearest documented kin, ritual insult, is individuated by a jointly held frame. What it does not supply: the speaker’s own avowal in the main exchanges, where the aim is Labov’s inference. Only the exchange in which a researcher’s hypothetical question is taken as a real sound has the speaker’s side stating its intention. The intention-based reply, that the hearers misread a sound, is not answered by the transcripts. The case sketches the elicited test that would answer it. No reading of the intention-based line or of Goffman has been added, so the question stays open.

Note of 2026-10-13: the intention-based line, read

Grice (1957, LIT-1042) and Strawson (1964, LIT-1043) are now read. Grice (1975, LIT-1041) is read in part, and Bach and Harnish (1979, LIT-1040) is filed unread. Three findings bear on the question as posed.

• The rival makes a prediction. For acts not essentially conventional, Strawson’s scheme leaves no case in which the overt intention is fixed and the act changes. The one such case it allows is the institutional slip, a “redouble” let slip at bridge, which it calls “essentially deviant or nonstandard”. A documented case of the kind this question asks for would therefore count against Strawson’s account directly. CASE-069 is a candidate, if Labov’s attribution of the aim is accepted.
• Uptake does not separate the two sides. The question lists Austin’s uptake as a reply to the intention-based accounts. Strawson takes uptake into his account as the audience’s recognition of the overt intention. After Hart’s objections he weakens it to “the aim, if not the achievement”. On this reading uptake is common ground, not a rival.
• The frame shows up on the Gricean side. Grice’s Cooperative Principle (1975, p. 45) is indexed to “the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange”, which the participants recognise in common and which “may evolve”. This is close to Goffman’s jointly sustained frame. It is stated for implicature, not for the individuation of acts.

Teasing itself is in none of the pages read. The question stays open. Its reading condition is now partly met: Goffman’s Frame Analysis and Bach and Harnish remain unread.

Note of 2026-10-30: Bach and Harnish’s side, second-hand

Harnish’s restatement of the expressed-attitude theory (LIT-1850, NOTE-1453) answers “intention” for every communicative act. Acts are defined by the attitude expressed, and context and mutual presumptions guide the hearer’s inference (p. 15); institutional acts are a separate class (pp. 22–23). Berdini (LIT-1877, NOTE-1445) quotes Bach and Harnish that acts “at best … create mutual beliefs … about rights and obligations” (1979, p. 124), so standing would enter only as mutual belief. That states the intention side in its authors’ terms. Harnish adds that expressing a belief and taking responsibility for it may coincide (p. 38), which bears on whether standing that enters through the intention counts as a relation. Neither text mentions teasing or supplies a case with the intention fixed. Goffman’s Frame Analysis and Bach and Harnish’s book (LIT-1040) remain unread. The question stays open.