Toward a Competence Theory of Genre
Another product of my youthful infatuation with the latest linguistic theories.
The paper argues that a language is not a homogeneous entity, but an ensemble of overlapping dialects, each characterized by its own set of rules, many of which, of course, may be shared by other dialects. This differentiation follows not only social and geographic lines, but also pragmatic lines of usage and purpose, among which genre plays an important role. The article deletion that takes place in the sentence place chicken in oven is for instance allowed in recipes, but ungrammatical in laws or essays. Taking exception to the classical structuralist view, this paper argues that rules relating to or defining genres--a term I do not restrict to the literary domain-- do not constitute a second-order semiotic system, riding piggy-back on the linguistic code, but should be viewed as an extension of the pragmatic component of the speaker’s linguistic competence. To support this thesis, the paper surveys the various types of rules necessary to a genre theory, examines the problem of their formulation in the framework of a semantically based transformational text grammar, and offers a discussion of their hermeneutic function.
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On the What, Why and How of Generic Taxonomy
Introduction to a special issue of Poetics on genre, which I edited. The issue contains contributions by Bernard Rollin, Robert Champigny, Mary Louise Pratt, Susan Tripp, Paul Hernadi, Michael Hancher, Martin Steinmann, Thomas Pavel, and Gary Olson.
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When Je is Un Autre: Fiction, Quotation, and the Performative Analysis
In 1970, the linguist John Ross took a step toward the reconciliation of generative grammar and speech act theory by suggesting that the deep structure of every sentence should be prefixed by a performative clause of the type "I speech act to you that P," where P stands for the sentence. This proposal is known as the "performative analysis." It presupposes that all instances of the first and second person pronoun in the sentence will be co-referential with the I and You of the performative prefix. In this paper I examine three types of utterances where this co-referentiality is broken, and I propose appropriate amendments to the performative analysis. These types are fiction, direct quote, and metalinguistic statements ("I should be capitalized"). The paper also discusses the contrast between direct, indirect and free indirect discourse, focusing on the problem of assigning an adequate semantic deep structure to free indirect discourse.
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