Given John L. Austin’s Oxonian pedigree, we should expect his discussion of how “to say something is to do something” (1962, 12) to be taken up analytically. However, Austin also offers resources that have been exploited outside of traditional analytic philosophy—think of certain analytic feminist work, for example, or literary critical uses of performativity. For the most part, such work extends and inflects Austin’s notion of illocution and its related concepts of force and performativity for disciplinary-specific ends. This tendency in (...) reading Austin to focus on illocution and its related concepts is understandable. After all, Austin devotes most of his Harvard lectures, assembled in How to Do Things .. (shrink)

: While the work of such expositors as Max H. Fisch, James J. Liszka, Lucia Santaella, Anne Friedman, and Mats Bergman has helped bring into sharp focus why Peirce took the third branch of semiotic (speculative rhetoric) to be "the highest and most living branch of logic," more needs to be done to show the extent to which the least developed branch of his theory of signs is, at once, its potentially most fruitful and important. The author of this paper (...) thus begins to trace out even more fully than these scholars have done the unfinished trajectory of Peirce's eventual realization of the importance of speculative rhetoric. In doing so, he is arguing for a shift from the formalist and taxonomic emphasis of so many commentators to a more thoroughly pragmaticist and "rhetorical" approach to interpreting Peirce's theory of signs. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

Charles Sanders Peirce was a polymath who made significant contributions to many fields of study, from phenomenology to astronomy and from physics to metaphysics. In his writings of some 12,000 pages published, and some 90,000 manuscript pages still unpublished during his lifetime, language and linguistics are among the recurrent topics. In fact, the second paper in the chronology of Peirce’s professional writings was on the pronunciation of Shakespearean English. However, Peirce’s papers on language as well as his other linguistic insights (...) have remained mostly unexplored until today, although there has been a growing influence of Peirce’s general semiotics in contemporary linguistics. (shrink)