Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2003

In the present work I try to show how certain distinctive grammatical-rhetorical features of the hymns, such as frequent use of elaborate epithets, a rich arsenal of noun and pronoun address forms as well as a large variety of finite verb forms, can be accounted for from a pragmatic perspective by discussing them at the three main linguistic levels — morphology, lexicon, syntax. 10.39 is a representative laudatory hymn performed in a ceremonial setting, whose topic is related to the desire of a female speaker to find a good husband. The analysis is based on a socially and psychologically oriented application of pragmatic principles, namely, the politeness framework and it takes into account the specific context, on which the pragmatic interpretations are strictly dependent. The hymn is discussed as a communicative event, possible through the use of the Vedic language and designed to achieve specific ritualistic goals.

The use of language primarily displays succession, not simultaneity. It is common for people to talk at the same time or interrupt each other, but this is reduced to cases of succession. Vedic ritual involves not only succession but also simultaneities that are structural.1 In the “Soma swelling” rite, many priests recite two groups of mantras, A and B. First, one priest recites A while touching the bundle of Soma stalks. He then steps aside and recites B without touching Soma. At the same time, the next priest recites A and touches Soma. The result is that A and B are recited simultaneously but Soma is touched once by only one priest at a time. Other structural simultaneities may be attributed to a “horror of gaps.” A separate class are stage directions. A final comment is made on multifunctionality in space, a parallel to the temporal concept of simultaneity.

The theory of ritual presented in this article is based on the notion of “territory.” Ritual performance encompasses a set of techniques to affect the identity of participants: away from individuality and by communal demarcation of a symbolic territorial model in space or time. The form of ritual is seen as autonomous, i.e. as relatively independent of meaning. As a set of identity-affecting techniques, the elements of ritual can be integrated into both religious and secular settings. There is a natural tension between individuality, responsibility and the potentially totalitarian implications of ritual discourse. Ritual is claimed to be relatively harmless with respect to the symbolic territories of designated “sacred spaces”, while it is considered dangerous under conditions of “overflow”, when the elements of ritual are brought into public space. The harmful secular religions of the past two centuries are discussed, culminating in a plea for the separation between Ritual and State.

Although in some traditions (notably in India) oral epics are performed as part of a religious ritual, there is no overt ritual function of the epic in most oral traditions known today. However, even in a purely secular and seemingly non-ritual context, the performance of oral epics can have ritual dimensions. This is discussed with reference to the oral epic poetry of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. It is argued that the performance of oral epics is a particular type of communicative event, of which the comparatively rigid act sequence can be seen as being on a par with the patterning of ritual. A second important aspect linking epic performance to ritual is that both events are meaningful in a similar way. It can be shown that in the performance of heroic epics tribal and cultural origins are explored and that hence the primary function of epic is not entertainment but the search for ethnic and cultural identity.

In line with the proposal of de Roder (1999), we will draw an analogy between the structure of ritual, poetic language and natural language, exploiting Frits Staal’s conception of ritual as a set of recursively applicable formal procedures, and the biological ramifications of the Chomskyan postulate of Universal Grammar. The central hypothesis is that, in terms of evolution, poetry takes a position between age-old rituals and natural languages, as a sort of missing link. We will argue that the building blocks and mechanisms of natural language developed out of ritual acts and the associated rhythmic sound sequences. The formal principles underlying rituals turned out to be useful for communication and thus natural language could evolve, an example of exaptation in the sense of Gould and Vrba (1982). Under this view, the rhythmic layer of poetry — like syntactic structure — is a semantically empty, autonomous pattern, going back to the structural principles underlying ritual. Rhythmic patterns in poetry are thus instances of pure acts in the ritual sense, and as a consequence poetry is a form of language use in which the ritual basis of language is experienced. This puts T.S. Eliot’s famous dictum “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood” in a new perspective. The paper thus focuses on the ritualistic substrate of language, not on the synchronic role of ritual in language. We will also discuss neurological evidence which independently supports this idea: Broca’s area — an area in the left hemisphere of the brain that has traditionally been associated with language comprehension and production — is activated when syntactically complex sentences are being processed, but it is also activated in tasks involving the perception of rhythmic patterns in music, thus supporting the idea that both (and by implication ritual too) have the same origins evolutionarily.

This article brings some of the discourses of contemporary frame analysis to bear on female incitement — often called goading or whetting (from hvetja ‘to whet’) — in feud structures within several well-known medieval Icelandic family sagas. Broadly speaking, female goading in saga literature is a form of dialogic exchange in which women urge men to perform particular tasks, often seemingly against their will. These tasks mainly revolve around blood-vengeance and legal action, the twin obsessions of saga literature; in neither area is it simple for saga women to participate officially or directly. The article’s approach is similar to Marcel Bax’s (2000) approach to moments of ritual discord in sixteenth-century Dutch plays in that it considers specific historical framing practices as forms of ritual language.

We shall be concerned with a mode of epistolary politeness that marks a special category of ritual language use. Taking examples from the correspondence between Hooft and Huygens, two notable representatives of the Dutch Republic’s cultural elite, we will establish, first, that the notions and methods of the modern language-and-politeness paradigm are well-suited tools for exploring politeness phenomena occurring in seventeenth-century Dutch. Next we will argue that, in cases like the one under study, negatively polite ostentation is by and large a ritual affair, particularly since the use of subservient phrases and other expressions according to the humiliative mode is generally a game, rather than earnestly paying deference. As regards the issue of playful make-believe politeness, it will be contended that early modern society was quite preoccupied with various genres of “deceit”, artistic and otherwise, and took much pleasure in the witty exploitation of multiple meaning design, also when it concerned doing the civil thing.