Constructing witches and spells: speech acts and activity types in early modern England.

Culpeper, Jonathan and Semino, Elena (2000) Constructing witches and spells: speech acts and activity types in early modern England. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 1 (1). pp. 97-116. ISSN 1566-5852

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Abstract

In this paper, we highlight the centrality of verbs relating to verbal activities in witchcraft narratives in the Early Modern English period, and focus on speech act verbs used to refer to witches' curses. In the first part, we refer to various classifications of speech act verbs and to Searle's felicity conditions for speech acts, in order to describe the different meanings of verbs such as to curse, and to show how their central meaning has shifted over time. In the second part, we show how the speech act verbs form a structured set, which — in appropriate circumstances — could be used as an interpretative frame to create witchcraft events out of relatively trivial arguments within village communities. Here, we refer to Levinson's notion of activity types as a possible explanatory framework.

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
Journal of Historical Pragmatics
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3300/3310
Subjects:
?? linguistics and languagelanguage and linguisticsp philology. linguistics ??
ID Code:
1051
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
29 Jan 2008 15:29
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
15 Jul 2024 09:15