THE SEMANTICS OF SYMBOLIC SPEECH |
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Authors: | PAUL BERCKMANS |
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Institution: | (1) Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak \& Stewart, P.C, 4101 Lake Boone Trial, Suite 511 (27607), P.O. Box 31608, Raleigh, NC, 27622, U.S.A |
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Abstract: | More than half a century ago, the Supreme Court held that the free speech protection of the First Amendment is not limited
to verbal communication, but also applies to such expressive conduct as saluting a flag or burning a flag. Even though the
Supreme Court has decided a number of important cases involving expressive conduct, the Court has never announced any standards
for distinguishing such conduct from conduct without communicative value. The aim of this paper is to examine which conceptions
of nonverbal expression underlie judicial decisions on expressive conduct, and to offer an account of expressive conduct grounded
in contemporary semantic theory. The central hypothesis of this paper is that significance of expressive conduct can be explained
by principles that explain important features of linguistic meaning. I propose an analysis of expressive conduct that takes
the meaningfulness of conduct as a function of the action and its consequences in context. I develop a theory of expressive
conduct whose underlying conception of expression is based on a number of ideas from speech act theory. These are Grice's
account of nonnatural meaning, Austin's theory of illocutionary force, and Grice's work on conversational implicature. My
analysis understands the meaningfulness of conduct in terms of its relational properties and relevant features of the context
upon which illocutionary force, perlocutionary properties and implicature are predicated. The natural and conventional properties
of types of conduct, features of the context, and underlying social and cultural presumptions and expectations about human
conduct thus play a role in the constitution of symbolic speech.
This revised version was published online in November 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date. |
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