Say, display, replay: Erving Goffman meets Oscar Wilde

Résumé En

Pragmatics is the branch of linguistics that studies language in use—what speakers concretely do or avoid doing with words and utterances as they engage in communicative interaction. In this illustrated lecture-performance, speakers are taken for what they essentially are: social actors and moral movers (Birdwhistell 1970) who articulate meanings physically, using the rich semiotic resources of the human body, while attending to the face needs of fellow speakers (Goffman 1959, Brown & Levinson 1986, Culpeper 2011). The sounds and the movements that speakers produce are not only meaningful but patterned (Whorf 1956), since individual variation rarely strays from conventional formal arrangements (Langacker 2008): established sound patterns, movement patterns, intonation patterns, word patterns, and syntactic patterns, to which interactional patterns need to be added, since most social interaction has a strong ritual character (Goffman 1967, Schechner 2003). The present piece was choreographed in May 2016 and performed on June 6, 2016 at the TILLIT festival (Teatro in Lingua, Lingua in Teatro), Università del Piemonte Orientale (UPO), Vercelli, Italy. The lecture-performance was commissioned by Pr. Marco Pustianaz, Michaela Reinhardt and Umberto Capra (UPO). The script was written by Jean-Rémi Lapaire and the choreography designed by Jean Magnard. The visuals are either screenshots taken from the filmed performance at Teatro Barbieri (Vercelli, Italy) or “instant replays” shot outdoors shortly after the lecture-performance, in the beautiful historic district of Vercelli, near the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy (Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale).