Jak robić rzeczy bez słów?
How to Make Things Without Words?

Author(s): Danuta Ulicka
Subject(s): Studies of Literature, Sociology, Polish Literature, Philology, Theory of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: silence; performative; ethics and pragmatics of silence; quiet; understatement underspecification
Summary/Abstract: The paper tackles a problem somehow omitted in linguistics and philosophy of language: silence as a performative speech act. It is the agency that differs silence from other linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour, like quiet, understatement, underspecification, presupposition or implicature. The discursive character of silence is due to the authorial intention, the address, the felicity conditions and the assumed answer. Among the issues discussed are the dialectic bond between silence and speech and the negatively connoted linguistic representations of silence, enrooted in the Polish language and Polish political culture. The main protagonist of the study will be Tadeusz Kotarbiński, the side characters - other philosophers and poets who believed silence was action.

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