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and with Roman phrases'.16 And Freud echoes Sophocles in the discovery of an exemplary Oedipus 'within us all'. One could multiply such examples, not least with Derrida's readings of Plato as a founding text of Western metaphysics . . .17 This question of the exemplary nature of the ancient world and its effects has not yet finished being debated. |
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What a To-Do in the Language Lab:
Examples and Framing |
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'Winged words are also clubs; language is a lure; paradise is also the inferno of discourse' Monique Wittig
'"Most things should be tacit," said Walter, "I often wish everything was."' Ivy Compton-Burnett |
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It is, however, first with modern linguistics and philology that I wish to explore the example. The example is an integral part of linguistic analysis: almost any page of linguistics or any philological analysis will include normative, paradigmatic cases to demonstrate grammatical, semantic and other assertions. One particular branch of linguistics, however, namely, speech act theory, makes particular claims for the way in which examples should be formulated and analysed. (Both the fact that speech act theory in the work of one of its main theoreticians, John Searle has entered into a very public and strongly felt debate with the deconstruction of Derrida, and the fact that, with the growth of speech act theory in classics, my own work on Aeschylus has been criticized from a similar perspective, help motivate the following analysis.18) Now speech act theory, like deconstruction, is the work of a range of scholars who do not necessarily agree, and in particular several critics have pointed out how the widely read work of John Searle attempts to delimit the elegant equivocations of J.L. Austin, whose ideas he claims to expound and expand.19 On the one hand, Austin, who first developed the opposition between constative and illocutionary utterances that is, between the descriptive sentence or statement and the performative expression such as 'I promise' or 'I apologize' repeatedly shows in How To Do Things With Words how this opposition collapses so that the constative appears as a subset of the illocutionary. On the other hand, not only Searle but also structural linguists such as Benveniste, and |
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16 Marx (1977) 11. |
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17 See Derrida (1981c) 61172; (1987); and for an explicit discussion of the role of Greek influence, Derrida (1992). |
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18 Derrida (1988); Searle (1977); (1983). Goldhill (1984) is discussed by Clark and Csapo (1991), Judet de la Combe (198990). |
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19 See for discussion and bibliography Petrey (1990). |
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