Cover not available

In:Manners, Norms and Transgressions in the History of English: Literary and linguistic approaches
Edited by Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 312] 2020
► pp. 75–99

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
authorization required

Blunders and (un)intentional offence in Shakespeare

 | Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań
Published online: 11 August 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.312.04kiz
Abstract
Neither literary nor linguistic investigations seem to offer a clear pragmatic description of blunder. Blunders in social communication are popularly associated with gaffes, which are incidental offences that could have been avoided if the speaker had foreseen their offensive or perplexing consequences. It has been claimed (Wierzbicka 2003) that errors and blunders are mostly committed when speakers venture into “unsafe territory” (2003: 283), which makes it easier to make a serious mistake or to embarrass the interlocutor by not taking enough care or not thinking enough. Blunders in Early Modern literature, however, have never been pragmatically analysed even though they form a distinctive linguistic feature of some Shakespearean characters’ speech. This chapter analyses the linguistic behaviour of two comedy characters from Shakespeare’s plays, Mistress Quickly and Falstaff, with special emphasis on the effects of their blunders and how blunders affect both the speaker and the hearer. The aim of the chapter is twofold. First, I try to provide a pragmatic definition of blunder in relation to speech act theory and intentionality and explain how blunders are pragmatically different from gaffes. Next, I describe the perlocutionary effects of blunders based on the examples of Shakespeare characters’ speech and demonstrate how blunders can be employed as a means of literary characterisation.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Blunders: Pragmatic description and their effects
    • 2.1Blunders as FTAs
    • 2.2Blunders, intentionality and impoliteness
    • 2.3Blunders as speech acts: Illocutionary force and unintentional perlocutionary effects
      • 2.3.1Embarrassment and embarrassability
      • 2.3.2Humour
  • 3.Blunders in The Merry Wives of Windsor and King Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2
    • 3.1Mistress Quickly
    • 3.2Falstaff
  • 4.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Sources
  • References
References (39)
Sources
Chimes at Midnight. 1965. Dir. by Orson Welles. Screenplay by Orson Welles.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. 2000. The Merry Wives of Windsor, Edited by Giorgio Melchiori. London: Arden Shakespeare.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2002. King Henry IV, Part 1, Edited by David Scott Kastan. London: Arden Shakespeare.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2007. King Henry IV, Part 2, Edited by A. R. Humphreys. London: Arden Shakespeare. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
References
Abrams, Meyer H. 1999. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th ed. Boston, Mass.: Heimle & Heimle/Thomson Learning.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Austin, John. 1976. How to Do Things with Words. London/Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Attardo, Salvatore. 1990. “The Violation of Grice’s Maxims in Jokes.” In Proceedings of the 16th Berkeley Linguistics Society Conference, ed. by Kira Hall, Jean Pierre Koening, Michael Meacham et al., 355–362. [URL].Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1993. “Violation of Conversational Maxims and Cooperation: The Case of Jokes.” Journal of Pragmatics 19: 537–558. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2003. “Introduction: The Pragmatics of Humour.” Journal of Pragmatics 35: 1287–1294. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bousfield, Derek. 2007. “‘Never a Truer Word Said in Jest’: A Pragmastylistic Analysis of Impoliteness as Banter in Henry IV, Part 1.” In Contemporary Stylistics, ed. by Marina Lambrou, and Peter Stockwell, 209–220. London: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2008. Impoliteness in Interaction. Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 167. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Steven C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage.Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brown, Roger, and Albert Gilman. 1989. “Politeness Theory in Shakespeare’s Four Major Tragedies.” Language in Society 18 (2): 159–212. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan. 1996. “Towards an Anatomy of Impoliteness.” Journal of Pragmatics 25 (3): 349–367. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan. Gisle Andersen, and Karin Aijmer2011. “Politeness and Impoliteness.” In Pragmatics of Society. Handbooks of Pragmatics 5, ed. by , 393–438. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan, and Claire Hardaker. 2017. “Impoliteness.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness, ed. by Jonathan Culpeper, Daniel Haugh, and Dániel Z. Kádár, 199–226. London: Palgrave Macmillan.. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dynel, Marta. 2009. “Beyond a Joke: Types of Conversational Humour.” Language and Linguistics Compass 3 (5): 1284–1299. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eelen, Gino. 2001. A Critique of Politeness Theories. Manchester: St. Jerome.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Elam, Keir. 1980. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London/New York: Methuen. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fish, Stanley. 1976. “How to Do Things with Austin and Searle: Speech Act Theory and Literary Criticism.” Modern Language Notes 91 (5): 983–1025.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1956. “Embarrassment and Social Organisation.” American Journal of Sociology 62: 264–271. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2005. Interaction Ritual. Essays in Face-to-face Behaviour. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haugh, Michael. 2007. “The Discursive Challenge to Politeness Research: An Interactional Alternative.” Journal of Politeness Research 3: 295–317. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Holmes, Janet. 2006. “Sharing a Laugh: Pragmatic Aspects of Humour and Gender in the Workplace.” Journal of Pragmatics 38: 26–50. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Howard, Jean E. 1997. “The First Part of Henry VI: An Introduction”. In The Norton Shakespeare: Histories, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt et al., 248–249. New York/London: W. W. Norton & Co.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kizelbach, Urszula. 2014. The Pragmatics of Early Modern Politics: Power and Kingship in Shakespeare’s History Plays. Amsterdam/New York: Brill.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kotthoff, Helga. 1996. “Impoliteness and Conversational Joking: On Relational Politics.” Folia Linguistica 30: 299–327. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2015. “Speech Acts.” In The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Yan Huang, 199–216. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Miller, Rowland S. 1996. Embarrassment: Poise and Peril in Everyday Life. New York/London: The Guilford Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Raskin, Victor. 1985. Semantic Mechanisms of Humour. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Roberts, Jane, and Louise Sylvester. 2017. “Blunder, Error, Mistake, Pitfall: Trawling the OED with the Help of The Historical Thesaurus.” Altre Modernità/Otras Modernidades/Autres Modernités/Other Modernities. Errors: Communication and its Discontents. special issue, 18–35.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rudanko, Juhani. 1993. Pragmatic Approaches to Shakespeare. Essays on Othello, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Searle, John. 2010. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Spencer-Oatey, Helen (ed.). 2008. Culturally Speaking: Culture, Communication and Politeness Theory, 2nd ed. London/New York: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Terkourafi, Marina. 2009. “Politeness.” In Key Ideas in Linguistics, ed. by Siobhan Chapman, and Christopher Routledge, 157–161. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wierzbicka, Anna. 2003. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: The Semantics of Human Interaction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Yus, Francisco. 2003. “Humour and the Search for Relevance.” Journal of Pragmatics 35: 1295–1331. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Kizelbach, Urszula
2024. The pragmatics of royal discourse in William Shakespeare’s Henry vi . Journal of Historical Pragmatics 25:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue