Nevermind: On Retraction as a Speech Act

We discuss the nature of retraction, what its felicity conditions and effects on a conversation are, how it compares to other speech acts, and how it relates to social power dynamics. On our account, retractions are proposals to update the context a particular way and, as such, can be rejected. Our formal account models the effect of a retraction on the context to restore the common ground to a prior state, computable from the conversational record. Our account also explains the status of speech acts that follow the target of retraction. Retractions are cognitively costly on our account, but, we argue, this is the right result.