Abstract

Serious discourse is regularly opposed to fictional discourse. But what is serious discourse? Fictional discourse is ubiquitous and raises challenging questions to philosophical semantics. How to define serious discourse in a non-circular way? I use action theory and speech acts theory to propose an analysis of what a serious discourse is. The notion of expectation is central, as well as that of satisfaction: in serious discourse, we expect the satisfaction of illocutionary act and of perlocutionary plans.