The Receptive Act: Theorizing the Addressee in Divine Discourse Through Tafaʾʾul Morphology

This article argues that, although recent work in speech act theory has increasingly engaged with uptake, reception, and the addressee’s participation, the addressee has not yet been sufficiently theorized as performing a distinct volitional and transformative act. Existing accounts illuminate important aspects of how an addressee recognizes, receives, or responds to an address, but they do not fully specify the intentional structure involved in actively appropriating its normative force. To address this issue, the article introduces the concept of the receptive act, understood as the addressee’s intentional enactment of this appropriation, and develops the concept of the hearer’s intentionality as the intentional structure through which this act is performed. The Arabic tafaʾʾul pattern, particularly its takalluf dimension, is employed not as a direct linguistic equivalent of a speech act category but as a linguistic resource for articulating this volitional structure: takalluf denotes deliberate and effortful striving toward a quality or state not yet possessed. The article therefore distinguishes the receptive act from uptake, receptivity, or perlocutionary effect by focusing on the addressee’s active appropriation of an address and its normative implications. In the context of divine discourse, to which Wolterstorff applied speech act theory, this approach provides a framework for examining how divine address becomes operative through the addressee’s intentional participation. The article concludes by proposing that the receptive act can be understood as a distinct, addressee-side dimension of speech act performance, complementing rather than replacing Austin’s tripartite framework.