Blurb:

In chapter 4, The assertive speech act, the assertive speech act of Irish is examined. This includes a review of a number of assertive verbs of Irish. We explore the expression of the assertive speech act and its intended meaning, over and above what is simply said, and in this, we will appeal to belief, desire and intention of the speaker (and hearer, as appropriate) as component parts of the speech act. The convention of denoting the speaker as S and the hearer as H is adopted and we will employ this throughout the study, on the understanding that these roles will invariable swap during the course of a discourse exchange. We apply the formalism of the model in the representation of the speech act. An assertive commits S to a proposition being true such that, in uttering the assertive, S asserts that proposition if S expresses a) the belief that the proposition holds, and b) the intention that H believes that proposition.