Exploring the Language of Drama: From Text to Context

Front Cover
Jonathan Culpeper, Mick Short, Peter Verdonk
Psychology Press, 1998 - Juvenile Nonfiction - 181 pages

Exploring the Language of Drama introduces students to the stylistic analysis of drama. Written in an engaging and accessible style, the contributors use techniques of language analysis, particularly from discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics and pragmatics, to explore the language of plays.

The contributors demonstrate the validity of analysing the text of a play, as opposed to focusing on performance. Divided into four broad, yet interconnecting groups, the chapters:

  • open up some of the basic mechanisms of conversation and show how they are used in dramatic dialogue
  • look at how discourse analysis and pragmatic theories can be used to help us understand characterization in dialogue
  • consider some of the cognitive patterns underlying dramatic discourse
  • focus on the notion of speech as action
  • there is also a chapter on how to analyse an extract from a play and write up an assignment

From inside the book

Contents

From dramatic text to dramatic performance
6
Turn management in drama
19
studying discourses of incongruity
34
Implicature convention and The Taming of the Shrew
54
Macbeth
96
Three models of power in David Mamets Oleanna
112
a pragmatic
128
The give and take of talk and Caryl Churchills
142
Index
178
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