The textual analysis of dramatic discourse revisited
Linguistic layers and the (social) semiotics of play-constitutive and play-realisational elements
This article explores dimensions of dramatic structure which the literary linguistic analysis of a play text can illuminate within
an integrated model of dramatic significance. The play to be examined is John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the
Western World, known for its lexical richness, denseness of dramatic expression and not least the structural
creativity of its Hiberno-English, all of which provide an abundant fund of textual semiotics for the present drama-specific
literary linguistic analysis. The dimensions of the play investigated are (i) those of its ‘constitution’, which linguistically
comprises dialogue and stage directions, and characterisation, plot and setting as traditional constituents of dramatic structure
in their own right; and (ii) those of its ‘realisation’ as literary work, staging production and theatre performance and the
associated addressivity of materially the same play text at each of these levels. As such, it will be shown that the employment
of, and further development of, a linguistic model of social semiotics (after Halliday
1978; Fairclough 2003) enables a unified account to be given of the dramatic
meanings a play text expresses at these two levels of its internal construction and its external actualisation.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The literary linguistic analysis of dramatic discourse: Text, performance and (social) semiotics
- 3.
The Playboy of the Western World
- 4.Play-constitutive elements
- 4.1Two types of dramatic text: Dialogue and stage directions
- 4.2Three constituents of drama: Characterisation, plot and setting
- 4.3Text and characterisation
- 4.4Text and plot
- 4.5Text and setting
- 5.Play-realisational elements: Levels of text and addressivity
- 6.Further considerations
- 7.Conclusion
- Notes
-
References
References
Alter, Jean
1981 From text to performance.
Poetics Today 2 (3): 113–139.
Aston, Elaine & George Savona
1991 Theatre as Sign-System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance. London: Routledge.
Baumbach, Sibylle & Ansgar Nünning
2009 An Introduction to the Study of Plays and Drama. Stuttgart: Klett.
Biber, Douglas
1988 Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bigley, Bruce
1977
The Playboy of the Western World as anti-drama.
Modern Drama 20 (2): 157–167.
Bliss, Alan
1971 The language of Synge. In
J.M. Synge Centenary Papers 1971,
Maurice Harmon (ed.). Dublin: Dolmen Press, 35–62.
Burton, Deidre
1980 Dialogue and Discourse: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Modern Drama Dialogue and Naturally Occurring Conversation. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Crawford, Nicholas
2008 Synge’s Playboy and the eugenics of language.
Modern Drama 51 (4): 482–500.
Cruickshank, Tracy & Ernestine Lahey
2010 Building the stages of drama: Towards a text world theory account of dramatic play-texts.
Journal of Literary Semantics 391: 67–91.
Culpeper, Jonathan
2001 Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts. Harlow: Pearson Longman.
Culpeper, Jonathan & Dan McIntyre
2006 Drama: Stylistic aspects. In
Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, vol. 31,
Catherine Emmott (ed.). Oxford: Elsevier, 772–785.
Elam, Keir
1980 The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London: Routledge.
Fairclough, Norman
2003 Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge.
Feng, Zongixin & Dan Shen
2001 The play off the stage: The reader-writer relationship in drama.
Language and Literature 10 (1): 79–93.
Gavins, Joanna
2007 Text World Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Gömceli, Nursen & Allan James
2015 Hiberno-English and beyond in J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World: A literary linguistic analysis of its dramatic significance.
Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 40 (1–2): 105–125.
Grandage, Sarah
2016 Dramatic discourse. In
The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics,
Violeta Sotirova (ed.). London: Bloomsbury, 646–670.
Halliday, M. A. K.
1971 Linguistic function and literary style: An inquiry into the language of William Golding’s The Inheritors
. In
Literary Style: A Symposium,
Seymour Chatman (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 330–365.
Halliday, M. A. K.
1978 Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London: Arnold.
Herman, Vimela
1995 Dramatic Discourse: Dialogue as Interaction in Plays. London: Routledge.
Hickey, Raymond
2007 Irish English: History and Present-Day Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ingarden, Roman
1973 The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation of the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic and Theory of Literature,
George Grabowicz (trans.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Ionesco, Eugene
1958 Four Plays,
Donald M. Allen (trans.). New York: Grove Press.
James, Allan
2008 New Englishes as post-geographic Englishes in lingua franca use: Genre, interdiscursivity and late modernity.
European Journal of English Studies 12 (1): 97–112.
James, Allan
2009 Theorising English and globalisation: Semiodiversity and linguistic structure in global English, World Englishes and Lingua Franca English.
Apples – Journal of Applied Language Studies 3 (1): 79–92.
Kiberd, Declan
1993 Synge and the Irish Language. London: Macmillan.
Klarer, Mario
2004 An Introduction to Literary Studies. London: Routledge.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies
2005 Postdramatic Theatre,
Karen Jürs-Munby (trans.). London: Routledge.
L’Hôte, Emilie
2003 Translating life – J.M. Synge’s literary representation of Hiberno-English. M Ling thesis, Université de Lyon.
Macrae, Alison
2014 Stylistics, drama and performance. In
The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics,
Michael Burke (ed.). London: Routledge, 253–267.
Mandala, Susan
2007 Twentieth-Century Drama Dialogue as Ordinary Talk: Speaking Between the Lines. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Pavis, Patrice
1985 Theatre analysis: Some questions and a questionnaire.
New Theatre Quarterly 1 (2): 208–212.
Pavis, Patrice
1988 From text to performance. In
Performing Texts,
Michael Issacharoff &
Robin F. Jones (eds). Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 86–100.
Pfister, Manfred
1993 The Theory and Analysis of Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Richards, Shaun
2009 The Playboy of the Western World. In
The Cambridge Companion to J.M. Synge,
P. J. Matthews (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 27–40.
Short, Mick
1989 Discourse analysis and the analysis of drama. In
Language, Discourse and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Discourse Stylistics,
Ron Carter &
Paul Simpson (eds). London: Unwin Hyman, 139–168.
Short, Mick
1998 From dramatic text to dramatic performance. In
Studying Drama: From Text to Context,
Jonathan Culpeper,
Mick Short &
Peter Verdonk (eds). London: Routledge, 6–18.
Spacks, P. M.
1961 The making of the Playboy
.
Modern Drama 4 (3): 314–323.
Stockwell, Peter
2002 Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London: Routledge.
Stoppard, Tom
1968 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. London: Faber and Faber.
Synge, J. M.
1993 [1907/1904] The Playboy of the Western World and Riders to the Sea. New York: Dover.
Wales, Katie
1994 ‘Bloom passes through several walls’: The stage directions in Circe
. In
Reading Joyce’s ‘Circe’,
Andrew Gibson (ed.). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 241–276.
Watson, George J.
1979 Irish Identity and the Literary Revival: Synge, Yeats, Joyce and O’Casey. London: Croom Helm.
Werth, Paul
1999 Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. London: Longman.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Asghar, Ijaz, Shahid Abbas, Muhammad Bashir & Naveed Nawaz Ahmad
2021.
INVESTIGATING EXISTENTIAL INTERPRETATION OF WAITING FOR GODOT: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF LEXICAL FEATURES.
Humanities & Social Sciences Reviews 9:3
► pp. 1314 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.