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From Utterances to Speech Acts

By Mikhail Kissine

"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."

--François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod



Query Details


Query Subject:   The social construction of illness
Author:   Arran Stibbe
Submitter Email:  click here to access email

Linguistic LingField(s):  Sociolinguistics

Query:   Autobiographies, I find, take me into other worlds like no other
literature does. There may be inaccurate reconstructions and
distortions of events, but they show how people think and reason and
experience their lives. Particularly interesting are `pathographies',
detailed first person descriptions of how people are effected by
serious illness, not just on a medical level but also on personal,
emotional and social levels.

My own interest is in tracing the metaphors used in pathography, and,
through the wealth of information provided by the details of the
autobiographies, trying to assess their affect on people's lives.

Given what I see as their potential for illuminating the social
construction of illness I am surprised not to find lots of literature
on pathography. Arthur Frank writes that `There are virtually no
academic studies of nonfiction, first person, published illness
narrative; the sole exception I know is Hawkins (1984)'.

The question is, is Frank right? If anyone has come across either work
on illness narratives in popular non-fiction, or has found some
particularly interesting non-fiction account of illness then it would
be nice to hear from you. I'll send a summary of what I find to
everyone.


Arran Stibbe
(lics@warthog.ru.ac.za)


- --------------------------------------------------------
Arran Stibbe TEL: 27 461 318105 (W)
Department of Linguistics FAX: 27 461 25049
Rhodes University
Grahamstown 6140
South Africa
- --------------------------------------------------------
LL Issue: 8.188
Date posted: 07-Feb-1997



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