Pragmatic acts of love

Abstract

This article is a pragmatic examination of the manner in which early American female blues artists talk to their audience about love. It is an extension of the preliminary work of Kuhn (1999), who examined the lyrics of male blues singers, and Watson (2006), who applied a revised version of Tyrmi’s (2004) model to investigate the expression of love and sexuality in the lyrics of pre-1950s’ American female blues singers. Kuhn’s (1999) study concentrated on the seductive strategies of male blues lyrics and applied speech act theory to her corpus. This article aims to extend upon Kuhn’s enquiry, by examining, in greater detail, the seductive strategies and other acts of love expressed in the lyrics sung by early female blues artists. It is, and has generally been, perceived that female artists are less risqué and less assertive in requesting their needs, and that they are more genteel in expressing their desires and feelings. Watson (2006) disproved this assumption. I found that these women were direct in stating their needs, either for love or sexual gratification and had no qualms about stating these needs. In this article, I further investigate how these women express their needs and wants by applying Searle’s (1969, 1976, 1979) speech act theory to the lyrics of early female blues singers. In doing so, I pay particular attention to the use of assertives, directives, and commissives. This methodology is applied to a representatively selected computerised corpus of 111 songs by 39 different American female blues artists, who pre-date the 1950s. Like Kuhn (1999), I am particularly interested in arriving at a fuller understanding of how it is that as we listen to the blues we feel that these lyrics ‘talk’ to us and I am especially interested in proposing a pragmatic taxonomy of these lyrics