Genetic Bragging as a Speech Act: From Fictional to Non-fictional Discourse

Abstract

The fast and consistent progress in DNA research has lead us to vent the possibility that bragging about one’s own genetic endowment is bound to become a linguistic practice with economic and social entailments. The family resemblance approach (Kleiber 1999) was used to shape what we dubbed here “genetic bragging” in a prototypical perspective to the definition of speech acts. Our assumption is that the “genealogical bragging” in the pre-DNA-testing era is to be considered the closest resembling linguistic practice to draw upon to realize DNA-based bragging. We have collected an ad hoc corpus of fictional and non-fictional texts with instances of bragging about alleged inherent differences between human beings. The texts include 18th and 19th century natural science investigations, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and science-fiction movie Gattaca to identify major strategies of bragging. We have finally supported our hypothesis by looking at two communicative fields. On the one hand, we accounted for the way governments are regulating the use DNA-testing in the insurance industry; on the other hand, we reported a few instances of recent political discourse in which genetic bragging has been used.