#implicature

[omegaphilosophia]

The Philosophy of Pragmatics

The philosophy of pragmatics is a branch of philosophy that focuses on the study of language use in context, particularly the ways in which speakers use language to communicate effectively and achieve their communicative goals. Pragmatics is concerned with how meaning is inferred from context, how speakers convey and interpret meaning beyond the literal content of their words, and how language is used to perform actions and achieve social purposes.

Key aspects of the philosophy of pragmatics include:

Speech Acts: Pragmatics examines the performative aspect of language, studying how utterances are used to perform actions and bring about changes in the world. Speech act theory, developed by philosophers such as J.L. Austin and John Searle, investigates the illocutionary force of utterances (what speakers do in uttering sentences) and the perlocutionary effects of utterances (the effects they have on hearers).

Implicature and Inference: Pragmatics explores implicature, which refers to the meaning that is conveyed indirectly or implied by an utterance beyond its literal meaning. Philosophers analyze how hearers infer implicatures based on conversational context, background knowledge, and pragmatic principles. Gricean maxims, formulated by philosopher H.P. Grice, outline principles of conversation that guide speakers and hearers in cooperative communication.

Presupposition: Pragmatics investigates presupposition, which refers to the assumptions that speakers make about what their interlocutors already know or accept as true. Philosophers examine how presuppositions are conveyed linguistically and how they affect the interpretation of utterances.

Context and Contextual Meaning: Pragmatics considers the role of context in shaping meaning and interpretation. Philosophers analyze how linguistic meaning is enriched or modified by contextual factors such as situational context, linguistic context, and social context.

Reference and Anaphora: Pragmatics explores issues related to reference and anaphora, studying how speakers refer to entities in the world and how they establish coherence and cohesion in discourse through pronouns, demonstratives, and other referring expressions.

Politeness and Face: Pragmatics examines politeness and face-saving strategies in communication, investigating how speakers manage interpersonal relationships and social status through language use.

Overall, the philosophy of pragmatics offers insights into the dynamic and interactive nature of language use, shedding light on how speakers navigate the complexities of communication to convey meaning effectively and achieve their communicative goals.

[sophiaphile]

pieces of a philosophy of mind lecture, out of context, pt. 4

people believe 'the queen is dead' you can infer 'some thing is dead'

if you believe 'she is dead and buried' you can infer 'she is dead and she is buried'

Notice: This is an internalist theory

[pinkcadillaccas]

I'm loving studying the philosophy of language. The main complaint is autistics make is that implicature is too vague and there's no rule book for how to do it you just have to know why has no one written a guide on how to understand this??? There is! Check out my boy Paul Grice

[storked]

This is such a stupid pet peeve but I see it literally all the time I HATE when people claim that a statement "implies" something and there is absolutely nothing linguistically that actually does imply that thing it's just people using the idea of implicature to defend their own misreading of what was said

[thepandalion]

everyone go home I just won at life

[official-linguistics-post]

official linguistics post

please watch my favorite game changer clip ever

[harmonicaorange]

doing a pragmatics assignment on sitcoms im in my fkn element rn

[thosearentcrimes]

Read Bring No Clothes by Charlie Porter. If I followed the rule "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything", that would have been the only sentence in the review. Well, really, it wouldn't have existed, implicature is still a form of speech. For a while it didn't exist, since I read this book some time back now, but not out of moral concern, but rather simply because I'm not allowed to use the computers at work for personal shit anymore, and that's where I wrote these. So I finally got around to buying a new e-book reader instead, expect more reviews shortly, written from home this time. But I digress.

Bring No Clothes is a truly awful book about the fashion of the Bloomsbury group. I struggle to think of any redeeming features. It is shorter than the hardback makes it seem, but this is simply false advertising, and not a virtue. It chooses to give each chapter heading its very own entire page to sit on, to blow the letters up to an absurd size with liberal line spacing in the style of a panicking high school student, to pepper the book with black and white photos of dresses remarkable for their color. The hardcover copy I read pretends to have 340 A5 pages, and I would be surprised if it got to 100 with reasonable formatting. In truth it is a nothing but a handful of hastily concatenated half-written filler articles and a couple of unpublishable magazine features stuck between two hard covers for no apparent reason, an unfilmed script for a "video essay" (read: summary) that would be too long to watch and too short to say anything.

It is really quite literally a series of magazine articles. Charlie Porter is a fashion journalist, and his work on the book speaks to his total inability to adjust his writing style to the medium, the astonishingly poor standards in fashion journalism, and the seeming absence of any editing whatsoever on the part of the publisher. Though possibly it was edited, and earlier drafts were even worse. Somehow. There is no coherent theme to the book, no throughline connecting the individual chapters. There are entire chapters that are obviously unnecessary and poorly conceived, which would presumably have been removed if not for the desperate need to pretend the book is so much longer than it really is. Lastly, for some reason image descriptions are done in-line rather than through captions. Is this common in fashion journalism? It sucks to read, in any case.

The writing is shit. It's so unbelievably bad. Borderline unreadable, the structural issues with the book as a whole are reproduced even at the level of individual sentences. Porter's chief flaw is that he is preposterously self-absorbed. He is either unable or unwilling to separate his own impressions and delusions from reality. He spends substantial sections of most chapters writing about the personal experience of researching and writing the book, and plenty of other insufferable personal trivia besides. To pull that trick off without boring the reader takes extraordinary talent, personal charisma, and varied and interesting life experiences, none of which Porter seems to have. Not an amazing range of vocabulary on display either, and somehow I doubt this was a deliberate effort to keep the reading difficulty down. The miserable structure, constant pointless personal asides, and general inability to express what few ideas Porter may or may not have render the book a truly tedious slog.

When reading a non-fiction book, I would like to be able to pick out something I learned about the topic, some basic point of interest. It is impossible in this book, which contains nothing but boring accounts of relationships between seemingly insufferable people. Porter's narration does bring his protagonists to life in places, with some help from direct quotes. Unfortunately, they are brought to life as some of the most annoying egotists you've ever met in your life, which admittedly seems quite plausible for British upper class twits (well, mostly twits). Still, I don't put too much stock in that characterization, as it could very easily be projection by the blatantly self-absorbed author.

I generally try to recommend books to sorts of people who I think would like them, whether or not I was a fan myself. I suspect I am a poor judge of appeal, ultimately, but I try nonetheless. I think nobody should read this book, ever, for any reason. It is not that the book is evil. Reading evil has merit. The book is just bad. There are people who would like it, probably. Those people, in particular, should not read the book, as I suspect it would inhibit their development. Everyone involved in the production and distribution of the book should feel shame proportional to their degree of responsibility for what they have inflicted on the world in general, and on me in particular.

[touhoutunes]

Title: Implicature

Arrangement: as key_

Album: e^(x+i)<3u?

Circle: _bazaar records

Original: The Long-Awaited Oumagatoki, Starry Mountain of Tenma, Where is that Bustling Marketplace Now ~ Immemorial Marketeers, The Princess who Slays Dragon Kings

[sineala]

Superheroes and ethics

I realized that I wrote this last month on Patreon and forgot to post it here. I got asked to write meta about superhero ethics with regard to Steve and Tony. I ended up writing mostly about how Captain America's Plot Armor interacts with his principles.

I have been asked to talk about ethics and philosophy with respect to Steve and Tony. Unfortunately, the only philosophy-adjacent disciplines that I know well enough to speak about with any confidence are formal semantics and pragmatics, which isn't really all that useful in daily life unless you'd really like to learn about the differences between entailment, presupposition, and implicature, and also the Gricean maxims of conversation, which are great if you want to completely ruin conversations by violating them as many times as you possibly can.

So I'm not a philosopher, sorry.

But! I can talk more informally about Steve and Tony and ethics.

And I know there's been a lot of meta -- and actual books -- written about their differing views. I have a book here, A Philosopher Reads Marvel Comics' Civil War: Exploring the Moral Judgment of Captain America, Iron Man, and Spider-Man, by Mark White, which I have not read yet but it sounds like this is probably the book you want to read if you want an actual philosophical analysis of this stuff. Judging by the reviews, the author decides to associate Tony with utilitarianism and Steve with deontology. That is probably fun. I am in no way qualified to talk about it. On an informal level, the thing I find fascinating about them is that, when it comes down to it, Steve and Tony are really not all that different.

I have been thinking about this for a while, because the last time I left anonymous asks open on Tumblr, the final ask I got before I decided that this wasn't a good idea was someone who wanted to pick a fight with me by asserting that Steve/Tony was a bad pairing because "they don't think alike, have different morals, different interests, and different emotional issues that the other is not capable of helping out with." This is one of the reasons why I don't have anon asks on anymore. But I thought it was honestly an interesting thing to think about.

So I have been pondering this on and off for a while, and I realized that the thing that really bugged me about it was that their general thesis was that Steve and Tony were bad for each other because they have nothing in common. See, I don't think that's true. I think they have a whole lot in common. But I am also willing to acknowledge that canon likes to put them in situations where they're at odds with each other and it seems fairly easy to come up with circumstances that will cause them to want to beat the stuffing out of each other. But, crucially, this doesn't mean they have nothing in common.

(I also think they actually have a lot of similar interests and are actually very capable of helping each other with their emotional issues, which canon demonstrates multiple times. But that'd be a different essay.)

For me, one of the reasons why Steve/Tony are so compelling as a pairing is because they are so similar. Let's call it, like, 95% similar. They are remarkably like-minded when it comes to their values and how they view the world. It's just that then they can fight, bitterly, over the remaining 5% of differences.

They work well together most of the time and it's just the bits where they almost work together that are so agonizing and provide so much material for fandom. Because it's not like they don't understand where the other one is coming from, what they want, or why they want it. They do. They just don't understand how the other person can come up with a different path to the answer given their shared goal and shared values. Steve doesn't understand how Tony is willing to do something that Steve thinks is wrong, and Tony thinks, I don't know, that Steve's ideals are too naive for the real world. Tony thinks Steve's plans are unrealistic and Steve thinks Tony's plans are unacceptable.

There's also an additional complication, which is that Steve as a character has a lot of plot armor that Tony doesn't. Steve decides what he thinks is moral and what he thinks is immoral, and he simply does not do the immoral thing. And the thing is that the narrative helps Steve out with this. It's fine if he's idealistic! It's even okay if his ideals are naive! He almost never has to go against them. I am saying this as a big fan of Steve. The story really helps him out.

For example, Steve thinks that killing is wrong, so he doesn't kill anyone, generally speaking. (Depending on the retcon you believe in, he may have in fact killed zero people in World War II, which is kind of ridiculous.) But in situations where the best of the options involves killing someone, someone pretty much always ends up dead. It's just that someone else does the dirty work. Steve surrounds himself with a lot of spies and assassins (Bucky, Sharon, Natasha) and those people kill the people who need killing.

In Civil War, Steve believes Registration is wrong, and he never has to change his mind. He probably still believes it's wrong. Instead of going on trial, he dies; he never has to face the consequences of any of his actions. The narrative shields him from that. When he comes back to life, Registration is gone and he gets a pardon from the president. It's all taken care of. He causes a lot of damage, and he doesn't even have to say he's sorry for trying to bash Tony's face in, in public, with witnesses, after having destroyed what looks like several city blocks.

So Steve never compromises his principles, because he has the luxury afforded to him by the plot so that he almost never has to be in a situation where he'd have to decide whether he should compromise his principles, say, for the sake of the greater good. He doesn't have to make that choice, because Marvel's not interested in writing stories where Steve has to make that choice. So it just… doesn't come up. He almost never has to put his ethics to an actual test. If you hand Steve the trolley problem, he'd just say, well, I'd save everyone. That's not an actual option in the trolley problem. But he's pretty much always going to be in a plot where he gets to do the right thing and save everyone.

Tony, though? Tony has to do terrible things for the sake of the greater good all the time. He doesn't get to opt out of the decisions. Even on a personal level, he has to do terrible things to himself. He has to decide probably at least half a dozen times whether he should wear the armor even if wearing the armor is hurting him -- say, when he decides to take on the LMD in the arc where he gets his first artificial heart, or in Armor Wars II, or in that storyline in the middle of Busiek's run after he gets beaten up by the Mandarin. And he always decides to wear the armor no matter what the personal cost is to his body. He ends up in a lot of fights where he has to take pretty bad damage to save the world -- and while Steve would also make that decision, Steve's going to heal up and be fine, like in his recent run where Bucky shoots him in the shoulder. He has a healing factor and he's fine in a couple weeks. Tony breaks his back in order to save civilians and then gets addicted to morphine and ruins his life for a good long while. That kind of stuff, with lasting physical consequences, just doesn't happen to Steve. Let's not talk about Streets of Poison.

It's pretty obvious when you look at their biggest fights (say, Civil War and the incursions) that Tony believes that the ends justify the means, and Steve doesn't. However, Steve doesn't exactly have usable alternate suggestions. The plot armor helps him out there. Steve espouses extremely noble ideas, life and liberty and all that… that are not actually workable plans.

And because of how the narrative treats him, he doesn't really need to have workable plans, either. It's not like he actually uses them. Because he's just going to be fine. (Except in the incursions, but everyone came back to life afterward so it's all fine.)

Steve doesn't like the SHRA. Okay. Fine. He believes it's an unjust law. His plan is apparently to just… keep fighting Tony and anyone else who tries to take him into custody for not registering. What's his endgame? Does he have one? His plan appears to be "be on the run from the government forever." As far as I can remember, he would prefer the situation to go back to the way it was but he does not, to my knowledge, ever propose a way of achieving that. He's not out there saying the law itself should be found unconstitutional or anything.

Similarly, with the incursions, after the Gauntlet breaks, the Illuminati have no solution for an incursion that isn't building bombs and destroying the other Earth in the incursion. Either they act to destroy the other Earth, or through inaction, both Earths are destroyed. Big ol' trolley problem. Steve refuses to play. Steve says he can't countenance that. Excellent moral stance. It's very him. He says, "I believe we'll find a way to stop it." He doesn't have any ideas besides "not the thing Tony is doing," which appears to also be his stance about the SHRA. If they'd let Steve stay in the Illuminati… what would he have done? I suppose the possibility exists that if he managed to flip one of the scientists to his side he'd get them to think up an alternate answer. He could have suggested that everyone evacuate Earth. But he doesn't actually have an idea, personally for what to do. Other than "nobody should die."

(That isn't even what happens, in the end. Of course, by the end, Steve is trying to hunt Tony down and kill him, so you could argue that he's not really behaving much like himself there, and neither is Tony.)

Anyway. When you think about it, what Steve wants and what Tony wants, in both scenarios, is pretty much the same thing. They have the same values and the same goals; it's just that the paths they're willing to take are different. But when it comes down to it, they both actually want the exact same thing. Like they do most of the time. They both want to save the world. Except now they're fighting about how to get what they want. The fights are about the details. At least in 616.

We can contrast 616 Civil War with MCU Civil War. I have actually only watched CACW once, so this is going to be fun and possibly inaccurate. The 616 SHRA and the MCU Accords are, very broadly speaking, about the same general topic: government oversight of superheroes. In the MCU, after the disaster in Lagos, the UN decides that they can't just have the Avengers running around wherever they want, exploding things and getting people killed. Tony agrees with the need for UN oversight. Steve does not; he feels that the Avengers should be able to go wherever they need to go without getting caught up in red tape. Here in the MCU, Steve and Tony not only disagree on what the right thing to do is, they disagree on what the right outcome should be, and the reasons for that. Steve wants things the way they were. Tony would be okay with some amount of oversight. They both have different visions of the way the Avengers would look and operate, because they value different things; Steve wants autonomy and Tony wants accountability. The fight isn't just about the details. The fight is about everything.

This isn't the case in 616 Civil War. No one is fighting for (or against) "I, a superhero, should be able to go wherever I want for superhero reasons." UN oversight is one of those things that all the Avengers, including Steve, have agreed about for years; there are panels of Steve asking to get UN clearance before the Avengers zip off to Russia to save Tony. What happens in 616 is that an inexperienced superhero team gets into a fight they can't control, destroying a school in Stamford, CT, with massive casualties. The SHRA is a US bill saying that all American superhumans (which is probably thousands of people) should register with the government, receive training if they want to be heroes, and provide the government with their real names.

Both Steve and Tony are opposed to this, before Stamford. Then, when Stamford happens, Tony realizes the SHRA is happening no matter what and decides to support it. Even with the SHRA in effect, both Steve and Tony think there should be superhuman oversight; Steve just thinks it should be the teams training people up, the same way as they've always done. They don't even disagree about that; Tony also thinks they should be in charge of oversight, but he means himself (and Steve if Steve would ever join him). The people training superheroes would in fact still be them, both of them, no matter which side wins the war. Neither of them trust the government to handle Registration well. Steve's answer is to object to the very idea of Registration and to stay away from the government, and Tony's answer is to get in there and keep the superhero database in his own head so that Gyrich won't get the list of names and start sending Sentinels after everyone.

So they both massively distrust the government's presumed right and/or ability to safely do this, and want to protect superheroes from government oversight as much as possible. That's basically the same stance. Steve just thinks no one should get anywhere near the government, and Tony thinks if he gets in there he can make it less bad. He can be the guy doing the oversight. People who don't register might get arrested but at least they won't be killed by Sentinels, because he can stop that from happening. Steve isn't willing to imprison his friends at all, probably because he doesn't believe Tony when Tony says the only other option is death (i.e., they can't go back to the way things were -- although of course that's eventually what ends up happening, albeit long after Civil War is over). He probably thinks there's a secret third option, because for him there usually is. But what they basically want is the same thing. Tony's just willing to go a little farther than Steve is to get there.

Sure, Tony's plans aren't perfect. But he does have them. Sometimes they're really lousy, because sometimes there is no good solution. I acknowledge that he does a lot of things in Civil War that are actually pretty rotten. I am saying this as a fan of Tony. He does some bad things. He starts a war with Atlantis. He manipulates Peter Parker into unmasking, which has terrible consequences. He builds a prison. He imprisons a lot of his friends. But none of these things involve the government massacring superhumans. The one really, really bad future he's afraid of doesn't happen. (And we know, thanks to that one What If issue, that that's exactly what would happen if he weren't running Registration.) Other bad things happen, yes. But not that, which is the worst.

Steve doesn't want anything bad to happen. Steve just wants the good solutions, with no moral or ethical compromise on his part. and he usually gets them eventually by narrative fiat. Sometimes he has to die first -- which is, of course, what happens in Civil War -- but, eh, whatever, it's comics. That's not really a major drawback for superheroes. And eventually he gets what he wants, because comics return to the status quo. Everything goes back to the way it was.

It's the same thing with the incursions. Neither Steve nor Tony want their Earth to be destroyed, obviously, but Tony is willing to build bombs to destroy the other Earths in case they can't find any other solution. Steve says he thinks there will be another way. And neither of them want to use the bombs! Tony doesn't want to use them at all! The Illuminati don't actually find themselves in a situation where they have to decide whether to bomb a populated Earth until the Great Society incursion, and Tony refuses to be the one to do it. After Namor does it, Tony is distraught and says he thought they'd find another way -- which is the exact same thing Steve said to him except nobody kicked Tony off the Illuminati for saying it. They both have the same attitude. They want the same outcome. They don't want to use the bombs. It's just that Tony's willing to build them. They're pretty much on the same side here about everything (including the desire to not bomb other planets) except the lengths to which Tony is willing to go to have a backup plan. Just like Civil War.

I suppose I would say that, overall, comparing Steve and Tony's relative ethics seems hard to do in a way that is fair to both of them because Steve is so often given the ability to stick to his beliefs in a way that Tony isn't. "What does Steve do when he actually can't do the right thing" is one of those questions that doesn't seem to get explored all that much, except possibly at the end of Hickman's Avengers run, in which everything was going to hell anyway, and it wasn't like he got to be in Secret Wars to try to fix it. He does also tend to quit being Captain America when he doesn't like the government, although I think in that case that's more that doing the right thing at that time is Not Being Captain America.

(Secret Avengers is also a pretty good look at a Steve who has to do bad things and really, really doesn't like the things he's doing. He doesn't handle compromising his own values all that well. I think that would be a whole other essay.)

But anyway, yeah -- I think 616 Steve and Tony are on the same side when they fight, more than you might think they are given how many panels we have of them dramatically punching each other. Tony believes that the ends justify the means, and essentially, a lot of their fights are because Steve disagrees with Tony's means -- but he is very often 100% on board with Tony's actual motives, which I think is a fact that often gets lost when we start talking about their conflicts, because at that point we… want to talk about their conflicts. But I think they really do agree with each other a lot, which is what makes their conflicts so interesting and painful.

[random2908]

Why do people think Bro is rich? It says he makes “thousands a month.” In other words, enough to rent a one-bedroom apartment in a big city (Bro sleeps in the living room), buy more puppets, fund Dave’s hobbies, and sometimes have enough left over for food. The Striders are lower middle class at best. (That said, I agree that Bro probably does pay taxes because he thinks it’s fun in some warped, ironic way.)

Do you think Dave Strider like, legally existed? Did he have a social security number? Did noted unhinged Texan Bro Strider ever actually make the choice of "I should tell the federal government about my end-times warrior child"? Because now that I'm thinking about it I would not bet money on it.

[thepandalion]

the autism really fucking with me in class today

(context: studying implicatures. apparently, if you're asked "where's danny" and the response is "there's a red bike parked near dina's house" you're supposed to understand that danny is at dinas house?? and not that your conversation partner is having a stroke??????? Im so confused)

[loki-zen]

just pinged to this from the subject of "the history of black people in the UK did not begin at Windrush".

i worked on a kids local history project once and got particularly attached to a guy called James Jarvis Wiggins

his was just one of several documented black families living in the small town in northwest england that the project was about in the 1800s (and there were more 'coloured' people whose names and specific ethnicities are not recorded)

but he seems to have been quite a Character; I mean the photo oughta get it across - he seems to have had That Exact personality; funny, larger than life, and been loved by everyone in town for it.

he came over from Virginia in a timeframe that suggests he might've been born into slavery

he pitched himself as 'The Great American Herbalist' when he wrote a book

he became a pillar of the community who ran a successful apothecary and had a comfortably middle-class lifestyle, including employing an assistant from another local 'coloured' family who went on to marry his daughter

the wedding received glowing coverage in the local newspaper - which (having read the 1800s newspaper article myself) did regard the skin colour of the happy couple as a novelty worthy of note, but with zero negative implicature whatsoever - paraphrased, it's saying "Daughter of successful businessman and local legend gets married to his apprentice. This will be the first wedding in our little town where both bride and groom are black, isn't that interesting? Now back to gushing about how lovely the wedding was."

[inthewaytoamultilinguallife]

like you are not wrong, but jesus don't say it aloud

I'm reading this paper that treats the terms Don/Doña as spanish honorifics and

man, you are not wrong but god does that sound weird calling them that

[percheduphere]

Hey! At first, I want to say that really adore your essays. I found your blog shortly after I joined tumblr and it was a great beginning.

My question is not only about Loki. Few times you mentioned that queer subtext always existed in cinema. So I wanted to know more about it. Are there any common tricks which artists use? How can we know that it isn't just our imagination?

And if you could give some literature recommendations on this topic I'd be thrilled :)

Hi Anon! 

This is a really important question. I’m so glad you asked it, so I’ve bumped you to the front of my inbox queue.  

Superhell (Destiel). Superheaven (Aziracrow). Supertime (Lokius). It’s not an accident these types of tragic queer endings are a pattern in our TV media. Though of the three, Good Omens is the most likely to deliver a happy ending eventually, the resources I provide below contextualize why queer subtext and queer tragedy persists. I believe the paper on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a particularly important read as it sheds light on tragic queer tropes and utilization of queer subtext from the 1950s that persist to this day. 

I do need to clarify a few things: 

1.) I’m not a formal scholar. I don’t have a Master’s, let alone a PhD. I would love to continue my education, but I only just finished paying off my student loans. This is to say, most of what I’ve learned is from self-guided reading, watching documentaries, and talking to literary and cinematic professionals and members of the LGBTQAI+ community. 

2.) Subtext exists in all forms of art: literature, music, painting, sculptures, film, and so on. There is no 1-to-1 definition of what subtext could be because subtext, by its very definition, is the communicating of information and/or a feeling without communicating it directly. It’s also important to remember that we use subtext in everyday life without realizing it.  

3.) It’s necessary to share foundational resources in order to provide a greater contextual understanding in response to your question. The resources I'll be sharing, which will go from broad foundational to specifically queer subtext in cinema, are as follows: A.) Using JSTOR, B.) Linguistics & Subtext, C.) Film History, D.) Queer Subtext in Literature, Theater, and Film. 

USING JSTOR 

JSTOR is an incredible academic journal article resource. You can sign-up as a user and have access to up to 100 articles per month online for free! If you don’t feel comfortable creating an account, you can also visit your local library, who more likely than not have a JSTOR membership. 

When searching for articles, I recommend using these keywords: queer, homosexuality, subtext, literature, film, history. 

LINGUISTICS & SUBTEXT 

Pragmatics 

-- Jerome Bruner’s “Pragmatics of Language and Language of Pragmatics” (Available on JSTOR; Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press) 

-- Kristin Borjesson’s “The Semantics-Pragmatics Interface: The Role of Speak Intentions and Nature of Implicit Meaning Aspects” (Available on JSTOR; Published by Armand Colin) 

Iceberg Theory and Theory of Omission 

-- Silvia Ammary’s “Poe’s ‘Theory of Omission” and Hemingway’s ‘Unity Effect’” (Available on JSTOR; Published in the Edgar Allan Poe Review) 

-- Charles J. Nolan, Jr’s “‘Out of Season’: The Importance of Close Reading’” (Available on JSTOR; Published in the Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature) 

-- Paul Smith’s “Hemingway’s Early Manuscripts: The Theory and Practice of Omission” (Available on JSTOR; Published by Journal of Modern Literature) 

Implicature 

-- Catherine Abell’s “Pictorial Implicature” (An important read as it provides academic context on interpretation of the visual medium, which is connected to interpretation of film; Available on JSTOR; Published by The American Society for Aesthetics) 

-- Eric Swanson’s “Omissive Implicature” (Linguistic study on implied communication through omission) Available on JSTOR; Published by University of Arkansas Press) 

-- Jacques Moeshcler’s “On the Pragmatics of Logical Connectives” (Published in the book: “Aspects of Linguistic Variation) 

Exformation 

-- David Foster Wallace’s “Laughing with Kafka” (Yes, the same writer of the book, Infinite Jest! A quick 4-page read that explains exformation in literature using Kafka as an example; Available on JSTOR; Published in Log by Anyone Corporation) 

-- Stephen J. Burn’s “Reading the Multiple Drafts Novel” (23 pages; can be a slog to read, but it addresses the issues of “canon”; Available on JSTOR; Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press) 

FILM HISTORY 

Generally, I recommend looking up Hollywood History pre-code (Hays Code aka the Motion Picture Production Code from 1930-1967). Notice that the code’s abandonment was gradual in the 60s, which was when the U.S.’s sexual revolution occured. The MPAA Film Rating System went into effect in 1968.  

Sin if Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood by Mark A. Vieira 

Available in hard cover on Amazon (looks like there’s only 1 copy left); no digital version that I can find. You may be able to find this at your library. 

Forbidden Hollywood: The Pre-Code Era (1930-1934): When Sin Rules the Movies by Mark A. Vieira 

Available on Kindle. Similar to Vieira’s first book but considered inferior.  

The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies by Vito Russo 

Published in the 1980s, a groundbreaking work and the first of its kind. It’s dated but still considered critical reading. 

Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies by Parker Tyler 

Available in hardcover and paperback. This is also considered critical reading to be paired with Celluloid Closet. 

Images in the Dark: An Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Film and Video by Raymond Murray 

Available in paperback on Amazon (1 copy left); likely to be in the library as well. 

QUEER SUBTEXT IN LITERATURE, THEATER, AND FILM 

Queerbaiting and Fandom: Teasing Fans through Homoerotic Possibilities 

The first book of its kind, published in 2019. A must-read as contributing articles include analysis on Supernatural, Sherlock, and Merlin, among many others. I highly recommend reading the entire book, but it is expensive. You may be able to find this at your library.  

My recommended articles from this book: 

-- Joseph Brenann’s “Introduction: A History of Queerbaiting” is critical to understanding the Loki series specific place in queer fandom and media history. 

-- Monique Franklin’s “Queerbaiting, Queer Readings, and Heteronormative Viewing Practices” 

-- Guillaume Sirois’s “Hollywood Queerbaiting and the (In)Visibility of Same-Sex Desire

-- Christoferr Bagger’s “Multiversal Queerbaiting: Alan Scott, Alternate Universes, and Gay Characters in Superhero Comics” 

Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World 

About half the price of Queerbaiting and Fandom but significantly more broad in scope. 

My recommended articles from this book: 

-- Cornel Sandvoss’s The Death of the Reader? Literary Theory and the Study of Texts in Popular Culture 

-- Derek Johnson’s “Fantagonism: Factions, Institutions, Constitutive Hegemonies of Fandom” 

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Reading of epic poem recommended) 

-- David L. Boyd’s “Sodomy, Misogyny, and Displacement: Occluding Queer Desire in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (available on JSTOR; from Arthuriana published by Scriptorium Press) 

Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (Reading the novel recommended) 

-- Jeff Nunokawa’s “Homosexual Desire and the Effacement of the Self in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’” (available on JSTOR; Published by The Johns Hopkins University) 

-- Ed Cohen’s “Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet of Representation” (available on JSTOR; Published by Cambridge University Press) 

-- Sandra Mayer’s “‘A Complex Multiform Creature’: Ambiguity and Limitation Foreshadowed in the Early Critical Reception of Oscar Wilde” (available on JSTOR; Published in AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik) 

Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Reading the short story [“Three Players of a Summer Game” and stage play and watching the film adaptation highly recommended) 

-- Dean Shackelford’s “The Truth That Must Be Told: Gay Subjectivity, Homophobia, and Social History in “‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’”. (A must-read, in my opinion. You see a lot of patterns that continue in our subtextual queer stories to this day, concerning since Williams’s play was written in the early 1950s. Available on JSTOR; published in The Tennessee Williams Annual Review) 

I hope these resources are helpful and interesting to you! Happy reading! 

[lingthusiasm]

Lingthusiasm Episode 80: Word Magic

The magical kind of spell and the written kind of spell are historically linked. This reflects how saying a word can change the state of the world, both in terms of fictional magic spells that set things on fire or make them invisible, and in terms of the real-world linguistic concept of performative utterances, which let us agree to contracts, place bets, establish names, and otherwise alter the fabric of our relationships. 

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about word magic! We talk about how the word magic systems are set up differently in three recent fantasy books we like: Babel by R.F. Kuang, Carry On by Rainbow Rowell, and the Scholomance series by Naomi Novik. We also talk about linguistic performatives: why saying “I do” in a movie doesn’t make you married, aka Felicity Conditions, aka an excellent drag name; performativity as applied to gender (yup, Judith Butler got it from linguistics); the “hereby” test; and how technology changes what counts as a performative.  

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:  People often ask us to recommend interesting books about linguistics that don't assume prior knowledge of linguistics, so we've come up with a list of 12 books that we personally recommend, including both nonfiction and fiction books with linguistically interesting elements! Get this list of our top 12 linguistics books by signing up for our free email list. Email subscribers get an email once a month when there's a new episode of Lingthusiasm, and this month existing subscribers will see a link to our linguistics books list! If you find this any time in the future, you'll get the books list in the confirmation email after you sign up.  In this month’s bonus episode, we get excited about the results of the 2022 Lingthusiasm Survey. We talk about synesthesia fomo, whether people respond differently to kiki/bouba depending on whether they're aware of them as a meme, complicating the "where is a frown?" map, the plural of emoji, and more! Plus, we mentioned swearing in this episode? Yeah, we’ve got bonus episodes about that too.  Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 70+ other bonus episodes, as well as access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds! Our patrons let us keep making the main episodes free for everyone and we really appreciate every level of support.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Sign up to our newsletter and get our list of 12 linguistically interesting books!

Etymonline entry for ‘spell’

Etymonline entry for ‘glamour’

‘Babel’ by R. F. Kuang on Goodreads

‘Carry On - The Simon Snow series’ by Rainbow Rowell on Goodreads

‘A Deadly Education - The Scholomance Series’ by Naomi Novik on Goodreads

Lingthusiasm episode ‘Cool things about scales and implicature’

Wikipedia entry for ‘performative utterances’

Superlinguo post on ‘I do’ and performatives in weddings

Government of Canada post on ‘hereby’

All Things Linguistics post on performatives

Judith Butler Wikipedia entry

‘Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity’ by Judith Butler on Goodreads

‘Universality and specificity in infant-directed speech: Pitch modifications as a function of infant age and sex in a tonal and non-tonal language’ by C. Kitamura et al

Tambiah 1968 on word magic

Lingthusiasm bonus episodes on swearing:

‘Real swear words vs pseudo swears’

‘The grammar of swearing’

‘What makes a swear word feel sweary? A &⩐#⦫& Liveshow’

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

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Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, and our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).