Abstract
The present paper focuses on the form of the first person present condition-al as a component of explicit performative formulae (EPF), which are considered to be a means directly expressing the communicative function of an utterance. We try to dem-onstrate that the performative usage of verbs is not limited to indicative forms of imper-fective verbs in Czech, as usually stated, but that also the form of the first person present conditional of imperfective as well as perfective verbs is used as an ordinary component of EPF.
In Section 2, basic characteristics of EPF are briefly described. Two groups of verbs (verbs of assertion and verbs of appeal) are examined on the basis of language data from two corpora: from the Prague Dependency Treebank 2.0 and SYN2005 corpus (Sect. 3).
In Section 4, the performative function of the conditional forms of these verbs is at-tested by means of Austin’s test and by some other criteria described in theoretical works. We further examine how the propositional content is