Permission to Change

In this paper I discuss how to account for the performative effects of imperatives, and concentrate mainly on permission sentences. In the first part of the paper I argue that the performative effects of permission sentences should be accounted for in terms of a context change theory by making use of contraction defined in terms of an ordering relation, and show also how this ordering relation evolves from permission to permission. In the second part a problem for this analysis is discussed, i.e. the problem of conjunctive permission sentences. I develop two ways to solve this problem. First, I suggest that this problem is due to the wrong way of accounting for contraction, and propose an alternative way in which contraction can be defined that accounts for the performative effects of conjunctive permissions in a more satisfactory way. Although the analysis is appealing, I will argue that we should account for the problem by means of a type-shift analysis.

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