Beaches of Hope, Beaches of Despair

Abstract

One of the subjects that have been discussed recently in language and in linguistics is performance. Speech acts are performative, and language is thus creative; linguistics, the discipline that is concerned with exploring how this works, involves performance too, of the expert and the academic, for example. We have wondered what it might be like to literally perform linguistics, in a real play. This would combine practices of work (doing research) and rest (doing something playful). Since much of our professional life has been devoted to tourism linguistics, we thought it might be interesting to take the notion of ‘rest’ even more seriously and situate the play at the beach, a place that has strong connotations of leisure. We also wanted to create a holistic impression: work and rest should all be in the play, and so we used materials such as our data, texts we wrote, things we took notes about, talks shared in professional contexts, the comments of others on what we did, and snippets of sounds that surrounded us.