ostension

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:10 AM -0500 2/9/11, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>OED calls "ostension"  'Now rare," with only one ex. since 1936, a 1998 from
>the _Fortean Times_ that says, "But as we have seen, this bogeyman has
>apparently come to horrible life in a process known to folklorists as
>ostension."
>
>I believe that the def. needs to be tweaked to not that "ostension" is now a
>technical term in folklore (app. introduced in 1983 by Linda Degh and Andrew
>Vazsonyi). E.g.:
>
>1991 G. A. Fine in _Journal of American Folklore_ CIV 179: Here was an
>example of ostension in action. Ostension refers to teh process by which
>people act out the themes or events found within folk
>narratives....Halloween posionings are most likely the result of parents or
>other kin attempting to make it appear that strangers did the dirty work;
>letting folk villains take the blame....
>
>In brief, folkloric ostension is the conscious performance of an action
>evidently learned straight from some widespread cultural narrative. Fine's
>ex. is the collection of aluminum pop-tops for the supposed purpose of
>helping to save terribly ill children.  This is a practice that seems to
>have to have started out as only a strange rumor. Fine was astonished to
>discover that Ronald McDonlad House, years later, had decided to put the
>rumor into practice as a way of raising funds.  Through the miracle of
>ostension.
>
>Ostension would also describe one reason why, when I was a bit younger, I
>dressed like Davy Crockett.  It was because I thought that the coolest guys
>were supposed to dress like Davy on TV. (Eventually I discovered my
>blunder.)
>
>Ostension is thus a very specific subspecies of imitation.
>
>BFD, right?  Well, my impression is that, except among folklorists,
>"ostension" really is "rare."  Very rare. But as a technical term it's
>in common use among certain scholars.
>
In particular, it's quite fashionable in cognitively-oriented
pragmatics.  Googling "ostension" + "relevance theory", for example,
pulls up 357 actual (not estimated) hits; the relevance theorists are
big on the "ostensive-inferential" model of communication.

LH

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