Some covert acts, indeed
Why should you read papers in Generative Semantics? Aside from the great abundance of data and lively discussion of thereof, sometimes the prose is just…well, just take a look below.
Here are a couple of passages from Jerry Sadock’s Toward a Linguistic Theory of Speech Acts, chapter 6, entitled Some Covert Illocutionary Acts in English.
Thus, both tag questions with falling intonation and queclaratives fail to show the properties of either of the questions or of the assertions that would be predicted on the basis of hypothesized underlying structure (135). I have no particularly clear idea, however, of what the common semantic source for queclaratives and falling-stress tag questions ought to be. Figure (142) represents a sheer guess with no syntactic backing. (p. 135)
It’s good to be upfront about these sorts of things. Next:
G. Lakoff (1966) has argued (apparently) that sentences of the form (186) with stative verbs are not true imperatives, on the basis of the fact that they do not [...].
Hmm…I apparently am not entirely sure of what Lakoff wrote, or what Sadock thinks of it.
As I side note, I recommend Robin Lakoff’s The Way We Were; or; The Real Actual Truth About Generative Semantics: A Memoir in the Journal of Pragmatics (1989, vol 13:6) for a sort of “behind the scenes” look at GS (mostly from one side of it, of course).