Term
Linguistic Presence
used in 53 texts across the archive
“There is a term that Gans uses throughout The Origin of Language that I think can be translated directly into “sustain the center”: “linguistic presence.” Maintaining linguistic presence is the urgent imperative that takes us through the succession of speech acts, from the ostensive, through the imperative and to the declarative. At each point a potential break in linguistic presence, which always means a potential outbreak of violence, is what forces the transition from one speech form to another.”
In use
“Linguistic presence is not a “channel” of communication, and al though for the higher linguistic forms, the channel analogy is an adequate approximation in most cases, it cannot help us to understand the origin of these forms.”
“The problem of linguistic presence is now posed in a new way.”
“If the other disobeys, linguistic presence is put in danger, and the moral thing to do is find some other way of maintaining it.”
Key texts