Commitment: the term and the notions
Résumé
The notion of 'commitment' is widely used in at least three major areas of linguistic inquiry: studies on speech acts, studies on modality and evidentiality, and the formal modelling of dialogue/argumentation. In spite of its frequent use, the notion has rarely been theorised for its own sake. In this introductory paper, we review the notion as used in the three areas mentioned above, paying particular attention to who commits themselves to what, and to whether commitment is essentially a private or a public attitude. The paper also introduces the eleven contributions to issue 22 of the Belgian Journal of Linguistics.
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