la noción de perlocución ha resultado problemática desde su primera formulación en Austin . Se exploran dos vías diferentes para su clarificación. la vía reconstructiva examina las ambigüedades incrustadas en la caracterización austiniana y trata de deshacerlas mediante taxonomías basadas en criterios precisos. la vía eliminativa , finalmente adoptada, propone sustituirla por una noción alternativa, la de marco situacional de una emisión, capaz de servir mejor al propósito de estudiar “el acto de habla total en la situación de habla total”.

Although perlocution has received more interest lately, it remains the great unthought of Austin’s theory. The privilege he gives to illocution over perlocution, rather than being a necessity of his linguistic theory, is a contestable philosophical claim that leads him, I argue, to exclude from his consideration poetic and other ‘parasitical’ uses of language. Cavell’s reconceptualisation of perlocutions as ‘passionate utterances’, however, provides a more fruitful theoretical framework to approach poetic phenomena. Reading Austin through a Cavellian lens offers keys to (...) make space for the parasitic uses Austin rejected and for poetry within a philosophy of language. (shrink)

The meaning of κερτομω and its congeners in Homer has been the subject of debate in this journal. Jones has argued that ‘to κερτομω someone is to speak in such a way as to provoke a powerful emotional reaction’, whether of anger or fear, and thus means ‘“to utter stinging words at [someone]”, “pierce to the heart”, “cut to the quick”, rather than merely “provoke” This definition seems to work well enough for some cases, but certainly not for all, and (...) especially not for the passage from which the whole controversy began: Iliad 24.649, where Achilles speaks to Priam ༐πικερτομέωυ. As Richardson says in his Iliad commentary, ‘there is no sign that Akhilleus’ speech has this direct effect [i.e. arouses fear] on Priam’. Jones's article was responding to an earlier one by J. T. Hooker, who attempted to ascertain the sense of Achilles’ ༐πικερτομέυ by surveying the usage of kertom- words throughout Homeric epic. He concluded that the basic meaning is ‘to taunt’ or, more abstractly, it ‘indicates the provocation of another person into behaving in a certain way, whether that is the behaviour desired by the speaker… or is not desired by the speaker’. The problem was that this definition did not seem to fit the very line from which his inquiry began, the words of Achilles to Priam. Hooker then hypothesized that the verse betrayed signs of an ‘imperfect adaptation’ of a different version of the poem in which Achilles taunted a defeated enemy or perhaps preserved his grudge against Agamemnon to its end. This explanation is unpersuasive. (shrink)