AP Language Class Notes
You covered similar ground as your peers yesterday, period 2. Here’re a couple of follow-up for all APELCers to see from the New York Post, “Backlash at ‘Garb’age”, and “Vandals Hit Obama Campaign Headquarters in Texas”, from an NBC affiliate in Texas.
Additionally, I’m thinking about the abject umbrage felt at my repsonse to Shawn’s comment about Hillary Clinton’s control over her campaign staff, remembering that no official determination about the re-release of the photo was ever decided, but certainly considering the electioneering practices displayed by all candidates and the lengths some will go to (or let staffers go to for them) for their persuasive, that is, rhetorical ends. Their marriage aside, consider that Senator Clinton had some trouble “controlling” her husband in South Carolina, much, to what many perceived, her detriment, and how she’s handling him now.
On another note, although I didn’t get to talk about with second period APELCers, I wanted to clarify the different types of speech acts I did discuss with fifth (and maybe second can pay attention, too). The taxonomy I’m most familiar with, is a modifed version of the one I shared in class, but looks something like this (from Traugott and Pratt’s Linguistics for Students of Literature, p. 229).
- Representatives inlcude stating, claiming, describing, and so on and “undertake to represent a state of affairs”;
- Expressives include thanking, welcoming, condoling, and so on, and express “only the speaker’s psychological attitude toward a state of affairs” (my italics);
- Verdictives involve assessing, judging, ranking, and so forth, and are acts that ”deliver a fiding as to value of fact”;
- Directives include requesting, commanding, inviting, et cetera, and are “desigined to get the addressee to do something” (my italics);
- Commissives invovle proimising, threatening, vowing, and so on, and commit the speaker to act;
- Declaratives, finally, include blessing, firing, arresting, et cetera, and are “acts that bring about the state of affairs they refer to”.
For some brief ideas on Speech Act Theory’s applications in rhetoric, read Andrew Cline’s excerpt at Rhetorica.net; for an in-depth look at the subject, you can examine the Speech Acts article at the Standford Encyclopedia of Philsophy; and, for a thorough treatment, read John Searle’s Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, if you dare.
Attend the homework. See you next class.
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