This paper sets out to unpack the pragmatic structure of refusal—its illocutionary nature, success conditions, and normative effects. I argue that our ordinary concept of refusal captures a whole family of illocutions, comprising acts such as rejecting, declining, and the like, which share the property of being ‘negative second-turn illocutions’. Only _proper refusals_ (i.e. negative replies to permission requests), I submit, require speaker authority. I construe the ‘refusal family’ as a subclass of the directives-commissives intersection. After defending my view against (...) a number of potential objections, I highlight how a theoretically grounded analysis of refusal is not only of intrinsic value, but may also have significant moral and legal implications. (shrink)

Speaker authority can spring into existence via accommodation mechanisms: a speaker acts as if they had authority and they can end up obtaining it if nobody objects. Versions of this claim have been advanced by Rae Langton, Ishani Maitra, Maciej Witek, and others. In this paper, I shift the focus from speaker to hearer authority. I develop a three-staged argument, according to which (i) felicity conditions for illocution can be recast in presupposition terms; (ii) just as certain illocutions require speaker (...) authority, there are also illocutions requiring hearer authority; (iii) accommodation may provide a way to confer authority to one’s audience, rather than gain it for oneself. Speakers sometimes act as if their hearer had authority, and the hearer can end up obtaining it solely by playing along. In closing, I pause on the potentially problematic interplay between informal authority conferral and social norms of female deference to men. (shrink)