Spoken Discourse Five

So this is what’s been bugging me about performatives: they’re not really, are they? They don’t, in and of themselves, change anything at all.

I know that they’re meant to be the conditions for the performatives to function as such, but surely it’s those themselves that ‘change the world’ and not the words themselves? A ship doesn’t get a name until it’s written on the side, a couple isn’t married until they’ve signed the register, and a student doesn’t get house points until they’ve been written down in the record book. It's not all magic, y’know?

Spoken Discourse Four

Ah, OK then. Lectures. Nice to see that I wasn’t completely off track last time.

Mainly practical, this one, again. Which is nice but doesn’t give me all that much to get my teeth into here. One thing I would ask is why “staying very close to the classroom analysis” is necessarily an “advantage”. I can see why it’d be pleasingly symmetrical to produce a unified theory, but square pegs, round holes and all that.

Written Discourse Ten

Right, this is pretty much what I’m doing my essay on: trying to work my way down to some practical applications of CDA. I’ll keep it on ice for the time being, but if any of the few of you reading this (“Bueller? Beuller?”) want to get into it in any further I’d be more than happy.

Written Discourse Nine

You know how I said that CDA felt very wooly? I take it back, I take it all back…

Written Discourse Eight

“They were also concerned with ‘scientificity’; in other words, a description meant ‘objective investigation’.

Also:

“observation done in a scientific manner has the status of value-free facts.”

Oh, be still my aching sides…