Naslov
How to do (dangerous) things with words: pragmatics of a pandemic context

Autori
Kovačić, Ana

Izvornik
Working papers in American studies (1849-6180) 5 (2021); 62-80

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Radovi u časopisima, članak, znanstveni

Ključne riječi
speech act ; news ; perlocution ; COVID-19 ; performatives ; J. L. Austin

Sažetak
The goal of this paper is to establish a new view of the performative aspect of speech acts, taking into account the pandemic context. Austin’s speech acts are defined ei-ther as something expressed to present information or as something that also per-forms an action. I posit that media language during various health crises changes pragmatically, shifting its strength from the locutionary aspect (what was explicitly asserted and meant) to illocution (what was done) and perlocution (what actually happened as a result). The pragmatic notion of a speech act is now intertwined with discourse and cultural studies and takes into account the extralinguistic reality – i.e., the pandemic. The main contribution here is to state that media discourse becomes an active participant and has the power to act performatively. The new pragmatic context during a period of a global pandemic comprises media discourses as pro-ducers and the general audience on the receiving side. Such a discourse has implicit performative power, since it deliberately does not focus only on the assertive aspect of providing information, but provides less information than needed in order to im-plicitly act as a source of ambiguity that invokes panic and produces various cultural decodings of such messages. I will examine typical examples of such ambiguous news texts on the most popular news website in the United States and review standard functions of ordinary language to be able to compare them to a new level of discourse in a pandemic context.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija, Interdisciplinarne humanističke znanosti

POVEZANOST RADA