Constructing witches and spells
Speech acts and activity types in Early Modern England
Jonathan Culpeper | Lancaster University
Elena Semino | Lancaster University
In this paper, we highlight the centrality of verbs relating to verbal activities in witchcraft narratives in the Early Modern English period, and focus on speech act verbs used to refer to witches’ curses. In the first part, we refer to various classifications of speech act verbs and to Searle’s felicity conditions for speech acts, in order to describe the different meanings of verbs such as to curse, and to show how their central meaning has shifted over time. In the second part, we show how the speech act verbs form a structured set, which — in appropriate circumstances — could be used as an interpretative frame to create witchcraft events out of relatively trivial arguments within village communities. Here, we refer to Levinson’s notion of activity types as a possible explanatory framework.
Published online: 04 May 2000
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.1.1.08cul
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.1.1.08cul
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