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Page 172
their entirety, and the force of utterances, including stylistic variation, is relative to the circumstances of their use, the conventions of the society, the relationship existing between speaker and addressee, and so on.3
In philosophy and linguistic pragmatics, the meaning or force of utterances has been a focus of incandescent debate, but this has hardly ignited classical poetics. Still, the notion of poetic genre, in the narrow sense in which this word has been simmering in Classics,4 begs many of the same questions.
Given the immense bibliography on poetic genres (in different languages and periods), I should stress that genre in this narrow sense is not determined by form but by the force of the utterance. In this sense, love poetry is not a genre, nor is lyric, elegy, epigram and so on. Nor, obviously, are tragedy and comedy. Rather, genres are kinds of utterance, such as saying hello or goodbye or happy birthday, wooing or renouncing a lover, praising an athletic victor or mourning the dead. It is this notion of genre that may be compared with two key concepts in the philosophy of language.
One is the concept of the speech-act, a term coined by J.L. Austin (1980). He holds that many (or most, if not all) human utterances do something, perform an act, and that in such utterances we can identify a basic illocutionary force. In other words: in saying x, a speaker does y. For example, in saying, "I'd like to be alone now," she was asking me to leave. Roughly speaking, the illocutionary force of an utterance is the thrust of what is said.
Wittgenstein's concept of the Sprachspiel (often translated as "language-game") is also meant to stress that speech is inextricably linked to activity, but he insists that it is impossible to define a Sprachspiel. One can only provide examples.5 Some scholars in linguistic pragmatics believe that
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3 Wittgenstein (1953) 337, 489, 525534, 588, 663. Part 2.IXXI; Austin (1980) 7374, 7677. 115, 138. Cf. Levinson (1979) and Bakhtin (1986). Sociolinguistics, pragmatics, the ethnography of speech, the sociology of language, social psychology, and social semiotics agree on this point.
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4 Cairns (1972), but the tradition extends back to earlier studies, such as that of the paraclausithuron (Copley 1956). Bundy (1962), in essence, identifies Pindar's epinician odes as a genre on pragmatic criteria. For a recent example, see Winkler (1990) 73, 8593, 9597 on the agoge.
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5 Wittgenstein (1953) 6589, esp. 71: "Und gerade so erklärt man etwa, was ein Spiel ist. Man gibt Beispiele und will, dass sie in einem gewissen Sinn verstanden werden. Aber mit diesem Ausdruck meine ich nicht: er solle nun in diesen Beispiele das Gemeinsame sehen, welches ich aus irgend einem Grunde nicht aussprechen konnte. Sondern: er solle diese Beispiele nun in bestimmter Weise verwenden. Das Exemplifizieren ist hier nicht ein indirektes Mittel der Erklärung, in Ermanglung eines Bessern. Denn, missverstanden kann auch jede allgemeine Erklärung werden. So spielen wir eben das Spiel. (Ich meine das Sprachspiel mit dem Wort 'Spiel'.)".

 
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