Consider use of the verb pay in the following extract from EDGAR:
In consideration for the conveyance of the Assets to Buyer, Buyer hereby pays to Seller consideration (the “Purchase Price”) …
You can’t pay someone just by saying so. As linguists would say, pay cannot be used performatively. In other words, pay doesn’t work in language of performance.
Way more verbs cannot be used performatively than can: clean, eat, drive, and so on. But it’s rare that you encounter a nonperformative verb used in language of performance. In fact, the above example is the only one I can think of at the moment.
Can you think of any others?
I respectfully wonder whether payment cannot be a speech act, a thing accomplished by the saying of it.
If I say to a bartender after delivering a sum to her, ‘Keep the change’, those words transform the excess over the price of the pint from some sort of bailment into a gratuity.
Or in the terms of the EDGAR example, can the Seller that signed the contract with those words in it thereafter deny payment?
In the same way, I wonder whether the following verbs may not also refer to speech acts: accept, acknowledge, agree, confer, contract, demand, grant, give, offer, promise, purchase, ratify, represent, sell, state, tender, and warrant.
The (perhaps wrong) test I am using is the ‘walkaway’ test: can the declarant deny the deed?
Example: ‘Oh, ha, ha, perhaps I *said* in the contract that I granted title to the Widgets to Acme, but I didn’t *really* grant title to the Widgets to Acme’.
Doesn’t work. The saying was the doing, so the grant was a performative, no?
As for the specific example from the great manure lagoon — In consideration for the conveyance of the Assets to Buyer, Buyer hereby pays to Seller consideration (the “Purchase Price”) … — I think it means, upacked concept by concept, the same as the following:
‘The Seller hereby conveys to the Buyer, and the Buyer accepts from the Seller, title to the Assets. The Buyer hereby conveys to the Seller, and the Seller accepts from the Buyer, title to the Purchase Price’.
The words make the transaction happen, not the physical location, movement, or possession of objects. So they’re speech acts. At least, that’s how it looks to me.
I’m comfortable saying flatly that no, you can’t pay with language of performance, any more than you can brush your teeth using language of performance.
Those verbs you list? They’re different.
THE DON to THE HIT MAN: ‘You’ve brought me the head of my mob rival on a platter? Then as agreed, I hereby forgive the gambling debts you owe me’.
Were the Don’s words of debt forgiveness not payment or not language of performance?
No comment.
Another one: to deliver. For example, you cannot deliver some documents by a speech act.
Thanks!
You can, however, deliver a speech about the Documents Act.