Reconceiving texts as speech acts : an analysis of the first Epistle of John

• Main Author: Neufeld, Dietmar
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: McGill University 1991
• Subjects: Speech acts (Linguistics)
• Online Access: http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=74595

This dissertation reexamines the assumption that regards the language of a text to be primarily discursive and propositional, signifying the antecedents to its real world, whether real or hypothetical. It will be argued that such an assumption reduces the meaning of the text to the nexus of its historical relationships. A methodological reconsideration sets out to reconceive the text of I John as a function of language, i.e., a communicative event encapsulating a series of speech acts which constitute the subjectivity of both writer and reader/hearer and which make truth claims about the world and about God though scarcely in propositional form. Important to this re-evaluation is J. L. Austin's fundamental observation that linguistic sequences rather than describing actions, are themselves action where an appropriate circumstance and linguistic convention delimit the potential speech acts possible within the limits of certain speech act circumstances. In addition, Jacques Derrida's significant conclusion that the act of writing is constitutive of the writing subject is linked with Donald Evan's realization of the self-involving character of religious language in which speech acts of the commissive, expressive, representative, and directive types and their implicature play a primary role in making explicit intention and attitude.