19 - Poeticsand performativity

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.