ABSTRACT
This chapter takes up the point about language-as-performed and relates it to broadly pragmatist views of language in a discussion of the arts and actions of linguistic performing. It goes on to explain, with examples drawn from both fieldwork and reading, the significance of a performance approach to human expression and experience. Performance and text are not after all two independent entities, but complementary dimensions of verbal art: in one way entextualized as words, written or writable, in another realized through multidimensional enactment, or, more elusively, through the ‘en-performancing’ of text, the ‘now’ when the reader personally experiences and (re-)creates it, intershot as this is with evocations beyond the immediate moment.
