ABSTRACT
Semiotics Although the early work in modern performance theory was dominated by strategies and concerns derived in large part from sociology and anthropology-an orientation challenged during the late 1980s and 1990s, as we have seen, by a turn toward psychology and psychoanalysis-another field in the social sciences, linguistics, was also significant. While seemingly much less prominent in performance theory, linguistics has in fact provided not only some of the most fundamental analytical tools of that theoretical tradition but indeed some of the most basic concepts for understanding what performance is, including the development of the closely related, crucial, and complex concept of performativity.
