Entries in JL Austin (4)

Thursday
21Jan2010

A Few Promises

DateThursday, January 21, 2010 at 12:24PM

(x-posted)

Note: In his Henry James Lectures How to Do Things With Words and BBC Radio talk "Performative Utterances," JL Austin explores a possible class of speech acts called "performative utterances" or "performatives." The basic performative consists of a verb formed in the first person present tense; Austin's central example of a performative is the phrase "I promise..." Austin believes that in saying the words "I promise..." the speaker effects a contract according to familiar conventions. These conventions are generally understood and accepted by both speaker and listener(s) in order for the performative to have "uptake," much like the signing of a formal contract. In an interesting passage, Austin provides a caveat in the case of fictional utterances: "a performative utterance will... be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy" (pg 22). This caveat has important implications for the Wordhoard analysis which follows.

I decided to look at the verb "promise" as it is used in Shakespeare's work. My hypothesis was that any uses of the verb "promise" will occur early in the text and any accompanying verbs will be acted out in later scenes. For example, if a character says in line one of a play, "I promise to be faithful," then one would expect under my hypothesis that the same character will demonstrate in his/her actions either faithfulness or unfaithfulness with certain expected consequences. To test this hypothesis, I ran a series Wordhoard searches.
Search #1 Parameters
->Find Word...
Corpus: Shakespeare
Lemma: promise(v)
Group by / Order by: Work / Frequency
Group by / Order by: Work Part / Location

 

Search #1 Findings: Ten Lowest Frequencies
  1. Henry VI, Part 2 (1 match, 0.41 freq.)
  2. Richard II (1 match, 0.46 freq.)
  3. Love's Labour's Lost (1 match, 0.48 freq.)
  4. Julius Caesar (1 match, 0.52 freq.)
  5. Pericles (1 match, 0.56 freq.)
  6. Sonnets (1 match, 0.57 freq.)
  7. Two Gentlemen of Verona (1 match, 0.59 freq.)
  8. Hamlet (2 matches, 0.68 freq.)
  9. Othello (2 matches, 0.77 freq.)
  10. King Lear (2 matches, 0.79 freq.)

Click to read more ...

AuthorJared | Comment1 Comment |
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