Semantic and pragmatic language-games in poetry

Abstract

The paper is a short overview of the approach to poetic language in which the concept of language-game serves as a technical tool of analysis. A comparison between social games and language-games is drawn and different scientific methods of analysing games are mentioned. Of particular interest for linguists are the seminal theories of Wittgenstein, later partially incorporated into the Theory of Speech Acts, and the game-theoretic semantics (of Stenius, Hintikka and Carlson, among others). Literary semantic studies, however, have required an extension of the previous micro-game approach into a more holistic macro-game theory of discourse/text, no longer limited to the analysis of game some elements up to the level of sentence only. The application of the theory of games to literary texts seems to be most promising when games are subdivided into semantic games of the author, pragmatic games of the reader and autonomous games of the text itself.