‘A Separate and Distinct Tribunal’: Libel Law and Reviewing in Early Issues of Blackwood’s

2020 ◽  
pp. 57-75
Author(s):  
Tom Mole
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Libel Law

In their efforts to attain the authority to police literary culture, reviewers in Blackwood’s and other Romantic periodicals needed models for making judgments that would stick and offering not mere opinions but verdicts which made further debate impertinent. In other words, they sought the authority to pronounce felicitous performatives, the ability to do things with words. Applying J. L. Austin’s concept of performative utterances to periodical criticism, this essay suggests that one of the models that particularly interested the Blackwood’s reviewers was that of libel law. Libel courts and book reviews, after all, engage in similar projects, aiming to regulate public discourse and define the limits of what it is acceptable to say or write in public. They do this by means of authoritative pronouncements, couched in performative speech acts: verdicts and sentences in the case of libel courts, decisive critical judgments in the case of reviews.

scholarly journals ‘You dribble faster than Messi and jump higher than Jordan’: The art of complimenting and praising in political discourse

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zohar Kampf ◽  
Roni Danziger
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Political Communities

Abstract Communicating admiration and appreciation in public discourse are two important tasks for political actors who wish to secure relationships and advance models for civic behavior. Our goal in this study is to understand how political actors signal their desire to please addressees and advance political sociability by way of manifesting positive judgment towards others. On the basis of 241 utterances praising and complimenting others’ words and deeds, we identify the topics, patterns, and functions of these speech acts and the processes and struggles they evoke in Israeli public discourse. We conclude by discussing the role of positive evaluations in demarcating the boundaries of proper conduct in political communities and the ways the distinctive logic of politics is integrated with specific cultural speaking styles in influencing how members of the Israeli political community signal their appreciation and affect for other members’ skills, performances, and personalities.

scholarly journals Perceptions of Uncivil Discourse Online: An Examination of Types and Predictors

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (6) ◽  
pp. 795-814 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Kenski ◽  
Kevin Coe ◽  
Stephen A. Rains
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
News Consumption ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Lay Public

Incivility in public discourse has become a pressing concern of citizens and scholars alike, but most research has focused narrowly on incivility in elite discourse. The present study examines how the lay public perceives incivility, using two surveys to track differences in perceptions of specific types of uncivil speech and identify predictors of those perceptions. The results show that different types of incivility elicit different responses. In particular, name-calling and vulgarity were rated as more uncivil than were other speech acts. In addition, several demographic, personality, and news consumption variables were analyzed as predictors of incivility perceptions.

scholarly journals Evaluation in English-Medium Medical Book Reviews

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 137 ◽  
Author(s):  
María Ángeles Alcaraz Ariza
Keyword(s):  
Medical Journal ◽  
British Medical Journal ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Cultural Background ◽  
Negative Evaluation ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Social Harmony ◽  
Medical Book

The aim of this paper is twofold: 1) to identify the evaluative speech acts, either positive or negative, contained in a corpus of 30 English-written medical book reviews published in <em>The British Medical Journal</em> in the period 2000-2009; 2) to analyze the linguistic-rhetorical strategies used to convey this evaluation. Our main results illustrate that various mitigating strategies are used not only to soften criticism, but also to help maintain social harmony and solidarity with the reviewees. Moreover, negative evaluation is on many occasions voiced at aspects outside the book reviewed, which would mean that apart from showing their expertise in the field tackled, book reviewers also want to discuss certain issues of their concern and to put forward their cultural background.

scholarly journals Criticism and politeness strategies in academic review discourse: a contrastive (English-Italian) corpus-based analysis

Kalbotyra ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 70 (70) ◽  
pp. 60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuliana Diani
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Mitigation Strategies ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
Review Articles ◽  
Cultural Research ◽  
Politeness Strategies ◽  
Academic Review

Drawing on a corpus-based approach, this paper explores the mitigation strategies used to soften criticism in English and Italian book review articles in the disciplinary field of linguistics. Most corpus-based analyses on academic criticism have focused on the use and function of politeness strategies in English academic review genres, mainly book reviews. Recently, an increasing number of studies on academic book reviews have examined the issue from a cross-cultural perspective. This study attempts to contribute to the area of cross-cultural research on reviewing practices by exploring how criticisms are managed in a somewhat neglected review genre in academic discourse studies – the book review article. Criticisms will be identified on the basis of their lexico-grammatical features and further categorized into “direct” and “mitigated” (Itakura & Tsui 2011, 1369). The mitigation strategies identified in both language corpora mainly involve the use of sequences of speech acts such as praise-criticism, criticism-praise, criticism-suggestion, praise-suggestion, and hedging. However, their distributions reveal differences in the two languages. While praise is prominently used in both English and Italian book review articles, Italian-speaking linguistics reviewers employ a lower proportion of hedges than their English-speaking colleagues and are more likely to opt for suggestions as a form of indirect criticism. The results demonstrate that linguistics reviewers writing in English and Italian deploy a considerable range of linguistic devices when expressing mitigated criticism of peers. Their use and distribution are discussed in relation to national/cultural writing conventions, but also differences between “large” and “small” disciplinary cultures (Holliday 1999). Some implications for EAP learners and practitioners are also considered.

Book Reviews

2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 1199-1201
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Monetary Theory ◽  
New York University ◽  
The Public ◽  
Federal Deficit ◽  
The Us

Alberto Bisin of New York University reviews The Defcit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy,“ by Stephanie Kelton. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Examines the US federal deficit and its relationship to the economy through the lens of modern monetary theory (MMT), focusing on dispelling misunderstandings about the national deficit that have shaped the public discourse.”.

scholarly journals Słowo „Murzyn” jako perlokucyjny akt mowy

2020 ◽  
pp. 195-212
Author(s):  
Margaret Ohia-Nowak
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Neutral Word ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Communication Theory ◽  
Black People ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Media Discourse

The word “Murzyn”as a perlocutionary speech act Whilst an array of words is used by white Poles to describe and denote Black people both outside Poland and within the country itself, in recent years, a heated public debate has taken place in Poland concerning the on-going use of the term Murzyn in everyday speech acts and in public discourse. The word actively reproduces anti-black stereotypes and racist meanings, and also conceals the prejudice, not least by virtue of the fact that a number of White Polish public persons claim that Murzyn is a neutral word used inoffensively to refer to Black people. Recently, as the demonstrations after George Floyd’s death spread across Europe, the continuing use of the term has been widely protested by Poles of African descent, and a growing number of Polish linguists argue against the word’s assumed neutrality. In this article, I draw upon the internalism and externalism in communication theory as I demonstrate perlocutionary effects of the word Murzyn from semi-interviews conducted with black Poles in 2014 and 2020, and utterance of Poles of African descent from media discourse between 2011 and 2020. With regard to the histories, experiences, and perspectives of Black communities in Poland, I argue that the derogatory meaning of the word depends largely on its effects on thoughts and feelings of the recipient, namely the pragmatic perlocution and the externalist communication theory, and less on the intention of the speaker and the internalist communication theory.

Book Reviews: Dont'take the fun out of libel law

2000 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 71-73
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Bindman
Keyword(s):  
Libel Law
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