Chapter 9. Speech acts in the history of English

2022 ◽  
pp. 166-179
Author(s):  
Thomas Kohnen
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
History Of

Sermons as Practical and Linguistic Performances: Insights from Theory and History

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-144
Author(s):  
Abdulkader Tayob
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Ritual Studies ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Historical View ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Marking Time

Abstract Sermons lend themselves to ambiguous identification in the study of religions. On the one hand, they are easily recognisable practices, delivered on particular days of the week, or when special occasions or needs arise. They are usually given in clearly defined places at clearly defined times. They are given by designated or recognized individuals that vary according to the respective religious traditions. On the other hand, sermons are speech performances that may and often do vary from one occasion to the next. While prone to a certain formalism, sermon speech acts are open to variation from time to time, and from preacher to preacher. To extend the possibilities offered by sermons for reflection and analysis, I explore some of the theoretical insights suggested for sermons in ritual studies and from the history of sermons within religious traditions. There is no consensus within ritual studies, but there are some useful ideas and suggestions that cover and extend the practices and speech acts that constitute sermons. More significantly, I found the longue durée of the sermon in the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to be more resourceful. The historical view of the sermon in comparable religious traditions brings forth enduring elements such as reading texts, employing rhetoric, producing effects (including affect), signifying and challenging authority, and marking time and space. More than the theoretical models for rituals from anthropology and religious studies, this historical perspective brings out the value of the practices and speech elements that constitute sermons.

scholarly journals Diachronic change of rapport orientation and sentence-periphery in Mandarin

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vittorio Tantucci ◽  
Aiqing Wang
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Multiple Correspondence Analysis ◽  
Formal Structure ◽  
Structural Level ◽  
The Qing Dynasty ◽  
Rapport Management ◽  
Diachronic Change ◽  
Evaluative Language ◽  
History Of

This article provides a corpus-based analysis of formal structure and rapport orientation of evaluative speech acts in written Mandarin starting from the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) leading up to the present. It focuses on illocutional concurrences (IC) where the change of rapport management with the interlocutor significantly correlates with evaluative speech acts. The IC are holistic patterns that emerge at various levels of an utterance. They contribute both locally (i.e. at the morphosyntactic level) and peripherally (i.e. at the illocutionary level) to the encoding of contextually and temporally situated speech acts or pragmemes. Mixed methods of hierarchical clustering and multiple correspondence analysis indicate that the recent history of evaluative speech acts in written Chinese is characterised by a shift from prevalently rapport-maintaining orientation to utterances more overtly marked for (im-)politeness. Evaluative language in written Mandarin became less mitigated at the structural level and increasingly oriented towards rapport enhancement and rapport challenge. This shift significantly intersects with a progressive replacement of clause-final particles during the 20th century, especially after the so-called ‘May the 4th Movement’.

scholarly journals Topical Methods for Shaping a Linguistic World View in International Relations Students

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 576-580
Author(s):  
Emiliia Bushueva
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
English Language ◽  
World View ◽  
Petersburg Institute ◽  
Wilhelm Von Humboldt ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Linguistics

The language is a specific type of human activity, «a shape of thought». As a means of communication, it acts as an exponent of the speaker’s spirit and world outlook. The issue of shaping a linguistic world view in students of non-linguistic colleges and, in particular, the problem of the language impact on the way of view of life still requires its solution. The author of the article harks back to the history of foreign linguistic school of thoughts of German linguists Wilhelm von Humboldt (founder of theoretical linguistics) and Johann Leo Weisgerber (who proposed the term «the linguistic world view»), of American ethno-linguists Edward Sepir (author of the comprehensive typological classification of languages of the world) and Benjamin Whorf (author of the theory of linguistic relativity), of an English philosopher John Langsho Ostin, one of the creators of the theory of speech acts. The article mentions some ideas of the Russian world view presented in works of the national linguists, such as A.A. Potebnya, A. Vezhbitskaya, Ye.S. Kubryakova, V.M. Vorobyev. Drawing on many years of experience of teaching the English language in departments of international relations, linguistics and translation studies in St. Petersburg Institute for External Economic Relations, Economics and Law, the author examines the methods of shaping the linguistic world view in students of International Relations and Linguistics. As an example, the author brings forth a scenario of the lecture course in the discipline «Professional Foreign Language (English) in Studying the Topic «National Identity».

scholarly journals ‘Get off your arse’

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 526-540
Author(s):  
Barbara Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
The Social ◽  
Musical Discourse ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Uk

Abstract Although the UK has a centuries-old history of subversive singing, since the election of a Conservative-led government in 2010 and imposition of austerity-based economic and social policies, the number of choirs with a political philosophy and mission has grown. The website CampaignChoirs lists around thirty political choirs committed to a left-wing, green or anarchist agenda, which is reflected in the music and related actions. This paper takes as its case study the Leeds-based Commoners Choir and considers how its musical decisions enable it to communicate protest politics. Using critical discourse analysis, this study adds to the dialogue on musical discourse by focusing on the speech acts contained within the lyrics; the social impact of the Commoners’ performances; and the use of dialect to root the works within a distinctly northern culture. It concludes that careful consideration of discourse can demonstrate a more measurable authenticity in an artistic act of protest.

Pragmatics and Dialogue

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Leech
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Dialogue Systems ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Spoken Dialogue Systems ◽  
Spoken Dialogue ◽  
Cooperative Principle ◽  
Dialogue Acts ◽  
Analysis And Synthesis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Task Oriented

This article introduces the linguistic subdiscipline of pragmatics and shows how this is being applied to the development of spoken dialogue systems — currently perhaps the most important applications area for computational pragmatics. It traces the history of pragmatics from its philosophical roots, and outlines some key notions of theoretical pragmatics — speech acts, illocutionary force, the cooperative principle and relevance. It then discusses the application of pragmatics to dialogue modelling, especially the development of spoken dialogue systems intended to interact with human beings in task-oriented scenarios such as providing travel information and shows how and why computational pragmatics differs from ‘linguistic’ pragmatics, and how pragmatics contributes to the computational analysis of dialogues. One major illustration of this is the application of speech act theory in the analysis and synthesis of service interactions in terms of dialogue acts.

scholarly journals Le Mulâtre: A Call to Connection through Narrative Technique

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1,2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Longard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
The United States ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Human Being ◽  
American Writer ◽  
History Of

The short story Le Mulâtre (1837) recounts the tragic history of a slave during Haiti’s turbulent 1790s. The first published work of Victor Séjour, it is the first known work of fiction by an African-American writer. At first glance a typical melodramatic tale of brigands, betrayal and revenge, the work is anything but typical in its stark depiction of Caribbean slavery and in its sophisticated use of narration and voice. Written when slavery was still being practiced by both France and the United States, this overt yet sensitive critique is a triumph of the narrative art.This article highlights a modern Structuralist analysis of narration. Séjour not only moves subtly through levels of narration but also through shifts of point of view within discourse and even within speech acts which form an almost unconscious commentary on the action. Moreover, the apparently standard tragic trope is undermined by a complex weaving of life histories in which the triumph of humanity overturns the notion of tragic loss. Thus a story of oppression and inevitability is structured within a voice of commentary, insight, and agency: Séjour succeeds in connecting the humanity on both sides of an inhuman war and in underscoring what is at stake for both master and slave in the continued exploitation of human being by human being.

A diachronic speech act analysis of sworn testimonies in Polish criminal trials

2006 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 293-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wojciech Kwarciński
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
Complete Collection ◽  
Legal Context ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Speech Act Analysis ◽  
Proper Analysis ◽  
Selection Of

In this paper I employ a diachronic model of analyzing speech acts to trace the development of sworn testimonies through the history of the Polish criminal trial. The research is based on the complete collection of medieval testimonies in Old Polish that have survived to the present day and on a selection of legal texts recorded in modern criminal trials. My preliminary assumption is that a proper analysis of institutional acts such as testimonies can only be achieved when their socio-historical context is taken into account. This is due to the fact that the very existence of legal speech acts depends on a set of constitutive rules that are socially and historically variable. The study corroborates my hypothesis and offers evidence in favor of the view that the changing legal context in which testimonies occur affects not only the ways in which they are realized over time but also their performative function.

Between historical semantics and pragmatics

2006 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pasi Ihalainen
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Research Strategies ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
Pragmatic Analysis ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Historical Semantics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Term Trends

This paper discusses the methodology of conceptual history, a branch of the study of the history of political thought which focuses on the changing meanings of political concepts over the course of time. It is suggested here that methodological disputes among historians of political thought frequently arise out of differing theories of language and meaning and that historians should be more open-minded to the idea of combining various research strategies in their work. Conceptual history, for instance, can be viewed as the combination of historical versions of semantics and pragmatics. While the study of the macro-level semantic changes in the language of politics can reveal interesting long-term trends and innovative uses of language, a contextual analysis of speech acts is also needed when the rhetorical aspects of conceptual change are traced. This interaction of semantic and pragmatic analysis in conceptual history is illustrated by examples originating from eighteenth-century political preaching.

scholarly journals The Carpatho-Russian community in the Siberian socio-cultural space during the Civil War (1918–1919): a view through the prism of the history of emotions

Rusin ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 138-155
Author(s):  
K.A. Konev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Far East ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
Research Model ◽  
Symbolic Politics ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Inherent Part ◽  
Russian Identity

During the Revolution and the Civil War, a few score of thousands of natives of the Ciscarpathian Rus came to Siberia and the Far East as refugees and prisoners of war. All of them, including members of the Central Carpatho-Russian Council (CCC), had to choose different strategies to adapt to the changing environment. At the same time, this forced them to choose sides in the conflict, which, in turn, foregrounded the problem of self-identification. Addressing these issues in terms of the history of emotions, it is possible to build a research model that allows reconstructing and describing the adaptation and self-identification strategies used by the community as a kind of attempt to construct an “emotional community”. This construction itself could occur by creating certain “emotional modes”, which were a set of prescribed emotives – speech acts describing emotions and changing or causing them. Since emotives could be expressed in discourse and rituals, it is appropriate to turn to the analysis of the content of symbolic politics and media, namely the official CCC newspaper Karpatorusskoe slovo. This research analyses the newspaper publications to identify the emotives used by the CCC for shaping a certain emotional mode for the “emotional community” – the natives of Ciscarpathia, who found themselves in unfamiliar social and cultural environment in Eastern Russia. The analysis allows considering the specificity of the CCC’s agitation activities and the process of construction of the Carpatho-Russian identity as “an inherent part of the Russian people”.

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