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Wittgenstein's approach, with its greater flexibility, is to be preferred to that of Austin.6 |
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In some cases the kernel of a genre identified by classical scholars seems to correspond to a basic illocutionary force. For instance: in the syntaktikon, a departing traveler says good-bye; in the paraklausithyron a locked-out lover asks to be let in; in the renuntiatio amoris, someone renounces love or a lover. |
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Whereas Austin thinks the kinds of illocutionary force can be listed and attempts "some general preliminary classification", Wittgenstein stresses that the Sprachspiele in natural language are innumerable, and change over time.7 By comparison, the number of kinds of utterance in classical love poetry seems quite small. Though this may be due partly to the limits of the extant corpus, it probably reflects the tendency of classical love poetry to imitate utterances that perform a significant move within the history of an affair, and it is this set of moves that is limited. |
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Though the kind of utterance may be transparent in many poems (and we do not need, for example, the name propemptikon to see that in certain poems someone bids farewell to a departing traveller), it is often purposely disguised or hidden by the poet, and the failure to find it may lead to confusion and misguided "interpretations." |
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In classical love poetry the force of an utterance may be more specific than that of any of the illocutionary forces identified by Austin. Asking for kisses (as in Catullus 5) is not on Austin's list, but I dare say Wittgenstein would have considered it a Sprachspiel. Thus, though the kernel of a genre may correspond to a speech-act, it need not. And what we must find is that kernel, whatever it is, however expressed. |
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Since there is no generally accepted term for the "kernel" of a genre, I shall follow Wittgenstein's metaphor and call it the move.8 Referring |
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6 Levinson (1983) 280282. It should be noted that some of the examples of Sprachspiele given by Wittgenstein (1953) 23, e.g. beg, thank, curse, greet, pray, are also in the list given by Austin (1980) 15363. |
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7 Austin (1980) 150; Wittgenstein (1953) 23, (1969) 65, 9499, 256. Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria 3.43) astutely recognizes that utterances perform many functions, and (though he declines to classify them as rhetorical genres) provides a list of examples which anticipate the concepts of Sprachspiele and speech-acts. Cf. Bakhtin (1986): " . . . Each separate utterance is individual, of course, but each sphere in which language is used develops its own relatively stables types of these utterances. These we may call speech genres. The wealth and diversity of speech genres are boundless because the various possibilities of human activity are inexhaustible, and because each sphere of activity contains an entire repertoire of speech genres which differentiate and grow as the particular sphere develops and becomes more complex. Special emphasis should be placed on the extreme heterogeneity of speech genres (oral and written) . . ." |
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8 In Bing and Cohen (1991) 2050 it was dubbed the speech-action, but move seems more in keeping not only with Wittgenstein's arguments, but also with his repeated use of the analogy of a chess game. (As Harris [1988 passim] points out, this analogy was also a favorite with |
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(footnote continued on next page) |
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