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2 results

  • Chapter 1 - Stage Talk

  • Matthew Hunter, Texas Tech University
  • Book:
    The Pursuit of Style in Early Modern Drama
    Published online:
    26 August 2022
    Print publication:
    25 August 2022, pp 41-80

  • Summary

    Stage talk is a style that makes theater out of one’s own mastery of talk by generating a density of formal coherence in place of the messiness that ordinary conversation entails. As Erving Goffman has proposed, “[e]very transmission … is necessarily subject to ‘noise.’” In conversation, this noise manifests as interruptions, overlaps, false starts, rewinds, and other influencies. And yet we manage to filter out such static as extraneous to the conversation at hand, often with such success that we might be surprised to discover their inclusion in a transcript of what we had just experienced. Stage talk aestheticizes the idealization of form that subtends representations of speech: It purifies the noise that defines ordinary talk – interruptions, false starts, gaffes are gone – in order to impart utterance a conspicuous poetic coherence. The actor who delivers this language to audiences assembled at a playhouse constitutes the early modern period’s animating fantasy of publicness, which is the fantasy that a style of talk can turn one from a stranger into a spectacle for other strangers to imitate.

  • 24 - Linguistic anthropology and critical theory

  • from Part V - Interdisciplinary perspectives
  • Edited by N. J. Enfield, Paul Kockelman, Yale University, Connecticut, Jack Sidnell, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology
    Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    11 September 2014, pp 603-625

  • Summary

    Speech-act theory's view of speech as social action at first inspired linguistic anthropologists, but later became a foil for defining their own approach to language. In subsequent decades the study of the poetic function was extended to a wider range of discursive practices, including forms of face-to-face conversation. Tannen was among the first to study systematically poetic performativity in conversational encounters. A recent attempt to address the performativity problem can be found in the stance literature. The poetic function involves a species of performativity that operates by means of emergent likenesses and differences among chunks of text. Verbal taboos appear as the apotheosis of a folk analysis of performativity wherein the pragmatic efficacy of discourse is felt to be localized in words and expressions. The indefeasibility of verbal taboos thus contrasts with the greater defeasibility of explicit performatives.