Unfinished speech acts

In this paper I characterize an unexplored category of what I call unfinished speech acts (USA), intentionally designed by the speaker as incomplete, and intended to be finalised by the hearer. The speaker relies on the hearer’s contribution because she is willing to minimize conversational risk regarding a certain implicit content or a certain indirect speech act. I focus on three paradigm cases: insinuations, polite novel (as opposed to conventionalized) indirect speech acts, and flirting. I sketch a general characterization of USAs, and underline several important dissimilarities between USAs and standard implicatures and conventionalized indirect speech acts. In closing, I gesture at ways the notion of USA could clarify recent philosophical debates, from both a theoretical and a socially engaged point of view: my proposal elucidates how explicit and implicit contents manage to enter the conversational context and, more generally, how speech acts are successfully performed – with an obvious impact on how we conceptualize both the speaker’s and the audience’s conversational responsibility.