ABSTRACT

This book is based on a close study of modern drama texts. In the first section – Dialogue – it studies specific drama texts. Drama has been neglected by linguistic studies of literature, and this book develops a new area of literary-linguistic stylistics. It demonstrates how recent advances in the sociolinguistic analysis of conversation (discourse analysis) can account for readers’ and audiences’ intuitions about dramatic dialogue. The second section – Discourse – uses these studies to develop a powerful and general model of spoken discourse. As well as accounting for the utterance-by-utterance organization of dramatic texts, it provides a descriptive model for the analysis of naturally occurring conversation. Literary texts and natural conversation are used to illustrate each other.

part 1|98 pages

Dialogue

chapter 1|21 pages

The stylistic analysis of modern drama texts

Some background remarks and a practical example

chapter 4|7 pages

From dialogue to discourse and back again

part 2|91 pages

Discourse

chapter 5|16 pages

The alienated analyst

An argument for rich data for the discourse analyst

chapter 7|28 pages

Towards an analysis of casual conversation

chapter 8|22 pages

Suggestions for further research