Performative Language and Social Status in Shakespeare's Plays
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation attempts to clarify some aspects of the operation of speech acts as they relate to power, authority, status, and rank in Shakespeare’s plays. At its core, it consists of three arguments. The first is that the ultimate index of power is the ability to have one’s words felt. That power then may translate – in terms that are neither simple nor fixed – into authority, rank, and status. The second is that such assertions or deployments of power (unless authorized by broad cultural consensus) are almost always met with resistance, and that consequently the assertions most likely to succeed are those that are least visible. The third point brings the first two together. If speech acts are often a means of asserting and exercising power, then paradoxically those speech acts that are least overt will be those most likely to succeed in that assertion: speech acts that are indirect, off-record, ambiguous, or perlocutionary. Bearing these arguments in mind, I will consider the operation and either the frustration or fruition of social ambition in Shakespeare’s plays, particularly his comedies. The plays bear out the pattern that speakers who make subtle, incremental assertions of status, by means of exploiting expectations of speech acts and genres, can then consolidate those incremental assertions into more enduring changes in status.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".