scholarly journals Performance Anxieties: Interpellation of the Refugee Subject in Law

2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (01) ◽  
pp. 91-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trish Luker
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Legal Protection ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
Legal Process ◽  
Rhetorical Structure ◽  
Legal Recognition ◽  
Refugee Law ◽  
A Performance

AbstractRefugee law posits the refugee as a rights-bearing subject prior to legal recognition. The determination procedures from which legal protection may be availed to a person escaping persecution demand that the applicant be recognizable as a subject entitled to law’s power to name her as a refugee. In this article, I draw on speech act theory to investigate the rhetorical structure of refugee recognition. Viewed as a performative speech act, refugee subjectivity emerges as a result of repetition and citation of tropes of “refugee-ness,” which function to legitimate and naturalize certain representations as evidence of the grounds for protection. This places applicants in a paradoxical position: they must attempt to deliver their evidence as a performance of refugee-ness, but in making the narrative recognizable and understandable according to the norms of the legal process, the singularity, and possibly the authenticity, of the account may be lost. The argument is supported by empirical research conducted at the Australian Refugee Review Tribunal.

Communication And Speech Act Theory : A Contextual Study Of Language

2016 ◽  
pp. 16
Author(s):  
Makhlouf Abdelkader ◽  
Driss Mohamed Amine
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
Contextual Study

New Work on Speech Acts

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
New Work ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Recent Advances ◽  
Current Thinking ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Relationship

The essays collected in this book represent recent advances in our understanding of speech acts-actions like asserting, asking, and commanding that speakers perform when producing an utterance. The study of speech acts spans disciplines, and embraces both the theoretical and scientific concerns proper to linguistics and philosophy as well as the normative questions that speech acts raise for our politics, our societies, and our ethical lives generally. It is the goal of this book to reflect the diversity of current thinking on speech acts as well as to bring these conversations together, so that they may better inform one another. Topics explored in this book include the relationship between sentence grammar and speech act potential; the fate of traditional frameworks in speech act theory, such as the content-force distinction and the taxonomy of speech acts; and the ways in which speech act theory can illuminate the dynamics of hostile and harmful speech. The book takes stock of well over a half century of thinking about speech acts, bringing this classicwork in linewith recent developments in semantics and pragmatics, and pointing the way forward to further debate and research.

God’s liturgical activity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Wolterstorff
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
The People ◽  
Ancient Times

It is typical of Christian liturgical enactments for the people to pray and take for granted that God will act in the course of the enactment. This chapter first identifies and analyzes a number of ways in which God might act liturgically and then discusses at some length what might be meant when the people say, in response to the reading of Scripture, “This is the word of the Lord.” After suggesting that what might be meant is either that the reading presented what God said in ancient times or that, by way of the reading, God speaks anew here and now, the chapter suggests a third possibility by going beyond speech-act theory to introduce the idea of a continuant illocution in distinction from an occurrent illocution. Perhaps the reference is to one of God’s continuant illocutions.

Sentence mood

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Portner
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Major Topic

Sentence mood is the linguistic category which marks the fundamental conversational function, or “sentential force,” of a sentence. Exemplified by the universal types of declarative, interrogative, and imperative sentences (as well as by less-common types), sentence mood has been a major topic of research in both linguistics and philosophy. This chapter identifies the two main theories which address the topic, one based on speech act theory and the other on dynamic approaches to meaning. It explains and evaluates current research which uses the two theories, and identifies the most important insights which come out of each.

Sexual Harassment, Speech Acts, and Public Secrets in U.S. Higher Education

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Debenport
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
Online Conversations ◽  
Survey Responses ◽  
Discursive Representations

This chapter draws on data from U.S. higher education to analyze the ways that the language used to describe sexual harassment secures its continued power. Focusing on two features viewed as definitional to sexual harassment, frequency and severity, the discussion analyzes three sets of online conversations about the disclosure of abuse in academia (a series of tweets, survey responses, and posts on a philosophy blog) from grammatical, pragmatic, and semiotic perspectives. Unlike most prior research, this chapter focuses on the language of victims rather than the intentions of harassers. The results suggest that speech act theory is unable to account fully for sexual harassment without accepting the relevance of perlocutionary effects. Using Gal and Irvine’s (2019) model of axes of differentiation, the chapter demonstrates how opposing discursive representations (of professors, sexual harassers, victims, and accusers) create a discursive space in which it becomes difficult for victims to report their harassers.

On the Legality Under International Law of the Criminalization or Suppression of the Expression of Solidarity to Refugees

2020 ◽  
Vol 114 ◽  
pp. 102-113
Author(s):  
Obiora Chinedu Okafor
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Legal Protection ◽  
Refugee Law ◽  
International Refugee Law

As Professor Jastram has noted, in and of itself, international refugee law is not explicit enough on the issue at hand. It is not clear enough in protecting persons who come in aid of, or show solidarity to, refugees or asylum-seekers. That does not mean, however, that no protections exist for them at all in other, if you like, sub-bodies of international law. This presentation focuses on the nature and character of those already existing international legal protections, as well as on any protection gaps that remain and recommendations on how they can be closed. It should be noted though that although the bulk of the presentation focuses on the relevant international legal protection arguments, this presentation begins with a short examination of the nature of the acts of criminalization and suppression at issue.

scholarly journals Uttering geographies: Speech acts, felicity conditions and modes of existence

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (6) ◽  
pp. 1124-1140
Author(s):  
Miles Ogborn
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Human Speech ◽  
Everyday Talk ◽  
Modes Of Existence

The geographies of speech has become stuck in a form of interpretation which considers the potentially infinite detail of spoken performances understood within their equally infinitely complex contexts. This paper offers a way forward by considering the uses, critiques and reworkings of J.L. Austin’s speech act theory by those who study everyday talk, by deconstructionists and critical theorists, and by Bruno Latour in his AIME (‘An Inquiry into Modes of Existence’) project. This offers a rethinking of speech acts in terms of power and space, and a series of ontological differentiations between forms of utterances and enunciations beyond human speech.

Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse

Language ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 475
Author(s):  
William O. Hendricks ◽  
Mary Louise Pratt
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
Literary Discourse
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