Pauses and Hesitations in Drama Texts (original) (raw)
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AMBIGUITY IN THE SILENCES AND PAUSES OF PINTERESQUE DRAMAS
This paper aims at highlighting, by means of a synthetic approach in combination with analytical elements, some of the elements and peculiarities of Pinter?s dramas, which made him one of the most important playwrights of postmodern era. We will mainly focus on his silences and pauses he is so famous for, which became a trademark of his dialogue otherwise called the “Pinter Pause”. We will explore how failure in communication and the breakdown of human relations paved the way for ambiguity, nebulousness and menace. Our aim is to make clear Pinter?s ideas on silences and pauses when he used them, what he meant and we will reveal that the uttered and spoken word is important, but the most important is what is left unsaid, the idea understated beyond silences. Elements of postmodern literature found in his work made it difficult to understand and analyze Pinter?s work, often referred to and classified as illogical and irrational. Finally, we will try to restate once again the importance of silences and pauses expressed by 3 dots(…) in the Comedies of Menace, as the only way to penetrate through the real hidden significance of these dramas.
Stage Monologue and its Linguistic Features (Textual and Prosodic Analysis)
Indonesian TESOL Journal
Spoken language production is considered to be one of the most difficult aspects of teaching a foreign language. It usually involves mastering pronunciation of sounds and intonation. If nowadays many teachers do not worry about the phonetic details of sounds, there is still focus on intonation as it has a great impact on the comprehensibility of the learner’s English. This is a very important issue for future teachers because correctness of pronunciation is one of the goals of any spoken language programme, with students asked to produce quite extended spoken monologues and to follow the requirements of various intonational styles. The aim of this study is to analyse textual and prosodic characteristics of stage monologue – a text produced on a theatre stage or in a film. Analytical methods were applied in order to obtain information about textual features and prosodic stylistic markers such as pitch level, range, tone modifications, loudness, and tempo, and also to develop style-fo...
Examining the Language of Drama Texts with a Reference to Two Plays: A Stylistic Study
Examining the Language of Drama Texts with a Reference to Two Plays: A Stylistic Study, 2016
Analyzing the language of drama texts stylistically can be somehow challenging, due to the fact, dialogues need certain tools and techniques to be used. Therefore, the fundamental purpose of conducting this work is to show how to analyze plays stylistically. This paper focuses on two plays, namely, Major Barbra by G.B. Shaw, specifically, act (1) and knuckle by David Hare. In addition, showing a kind of comparison between the two playwrights' writing style, their choices and the linguistic variations, which the two texts have. Mainly, the analysis is based on Thornborrow and Wareing's (1998) model. This model applies methods of stylistics to analyze the aesthetic side of the language of the selected texts. This model also allows researchers to refer to certain tools related to pragmatics and discourse analysis to investigate the dialogues in order to reach to rightful interpretation. Since the language of drama texts shows diversity in its form, this methodology looks at a drama text as a combination of different genres which they need different tools from linguistics. In this way, readers can gain an understanding of the texts by following rational and tangible evidences from the language of the texts.
A Study of Menace, pause, and Silence in Harold Pinter Plays
A Study of Menace, Pause and Silence in Harold Pinter’s Early Plays, 2012
The particular characteristics of Pinter’s theatre such as the theme of violence, the competitive interpersonal relationships, the implied unwillingness in communication between the characters and the distinctive use of silences and pauses, distinguish his work from the writers of the absurd. Pinter makes particular use of “Silences” and “Pauses” as theatrical techniques that present a non-verbal way of communication in his plays. The frequent use of these particular techniques in Pinter’s dialogue has urged some critics to coin new expressions such as “Pinteresque” or “Pinter Pause” in the vocabulary of drama to specify Pinter’s technique. One of the important objectives in this essay is to point out the fundamental significance and function of the “Silences” and “Pauses” in Pinter’s work and point out their distinction. I will discuss how the silences and pauses function in Pinter’s theatre as a non-verbal way of communication by creating fragments in the dialogue. The plays which will be analyzed in this essay are The Room, The Dumb Waiter, The Birthday Party, and The Caretaker. My objective in this essay is to explore the context of these plays with regard to the theme of menace. In the first chapter, I mainly aim to explore the menacing context of these plays regarding the structure of menace and the ways it takes place in each play separately. This analysis will be presented in relation to the spatial territory in which the characters are confined. My aim is also to describe why menace is presented in a theatrical sense. I have chosen to quote some significant passages of each play in each section to illustrate my purposes in the first chapter. The aim of the second chapter is to define the character types involved in the presentation of menace, “The Intruders” and “The Victims”, and to analyze the strategies they use in encounters with each other. After describing the character types I will explore in detail how “The Intruders” use linguistic strategies to confuse and subdue their victims and finally victimize them and how “The Victims” use strategies to cope with menace in order to survive. There are some passages quoted from the plays to facilitate the purpose of the second chapter. The objective in the third chapter is to define “Silences” and “Pauses” as theatrical techniques used in form of non-verbal communication between the characters. I will discuss, based on Peter Hall’s definition, how these techniques are significant in understanding a Pinter play for the readers and the actors who perform them on stage and will further explore the function of “Silences” and “Pauses” and their distinction in the context of the plays in question in this essay.
The dialogue of plays and their contexts from the Early Modern period to the Present-day
Gabriella Mazzon and Luisa Fodde (eds.) Historical perspectives on forms of English dialogue. Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2012
This paper focuses on how the language of play-texts has changed in tandem with their contexts. In the first part of the paper, I will consider three aspects of context: (1) the play-text and its relationship with performance; (2) theatrical context, specifically the relationship between the stage and the physical setting of the theatre and the audience; and (3) the discoursal context, including the roles of the participants. The overall purpose of the next section, section 2, is to point out that there have been huge contextual changes, changes which are likely to have shaped the play-text. In the following section, section 3, I will consider three aspects of discourse: (1) turn-taking (speaker change and overlap; the timing of turns; turn signalling); (2) repetitive elements and adjacency pairs; and (3) pragmatic noise (especially the case of AH). The overall purpose of this section is to consider whether there have been changes in the language of the play-text, changes which may have come about as a consequence of the contextual changes. I will not be tracking how all these aspects have changed step-by-step over the years, but instead throughout I will compare present-day plays with early modern plays, in both cases concentrating mainly on comedies. In support of my arguments, I will report some of my earlier work, notably corpus-based work, undertaken with Jane Demmen (especially, Culpeper and Demmen 2011) and Merja Kytӧ (especially, Culpeper and Kytӧ 2010). Although I have been researching the language of plays for 25 years, this paper affords me the first opportunity to put some of the various pieces together, in order to see the larger picture of change.
AN ANALYSIS OF TURN-ALLOCATIONAL AND TURNCONSTRUCTIONAL COMPONENTS IN HAROLD PINTER’S THE HOMECOMING
The absurd plays of Harold Pinter are undoubtedly puzzling and enigmatic. It is a difficult task to decipher the meaning of the ambivalent dramatic dialogue in his plays. Pinter’s departure from the conventional dramatic style and his experiment with a new language of theatre marks his originality and greatness as a playwright. The introduction of various theories and frameworks of disciplines, such as, Discourse Analysis, Conversation Analysis and Pragmatics, towards the late 1970s and early 1980s, have immensely impacted the analysis of situations and characters in a dramatic text. This research paper examines and analyses selected dialogue extracts from Pinter’s
Translation Maneuvering and Speech Stereotypes in Harold Pinter’s Plays
Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences, 2015
modern British dramatists, still remains in many aspects an enigmatic figure for Russian spectators. The reasons for that lie in a complex exploration of human psyche and the inner world of the individual through very casual interaction full of with clichés and stereotypes that Pinter's characters use. There are a lot of interactive implications in his plays and they are delivered by the code and specific medial psychological and social format of the setting. It is argued that when translating Pinter's dialogue the translation scheme should rely on the functional concept of maneuvering that provides choice inselecting, meeting audience demand, and presentation devices in the target language. The study of expert translations of such common speech stereotypes as "you know" "I mean", "you see "in plays "The Caretaker" and "The Collection show pragmatic shifts between the source and target texts changing the effect of the dialogue.
Transformation of Text in Theatre
DEU Fine Arts Faculty International Art & Design Congress Oral and Poster Presentations Book, 2014
ABSTRACT The vast theatre history has a gracious existential score on the playwright’s precious “text”, which is considered as the essential element. Conversely, from the beginning of the last century, this score has started to get weaken, and as a result of this, the playwright had to give his place in the art of theatre, to the director. This period, in which the elements forming the theatre art that are becoming as important as the text, is followed by the post-dramatic approach. By this approach the importance of the text starts to disappear, comparing to the past. During this process, the text, which has been functioning as the carrying and main element during the past 2500 years, had passed through so many transformations formally and contently. Besides, in the post-dramatic approach, the theatre text transforms not only in the sense of form and content, but also in the sense of importance. The transformation of the theatre text is also related to today’s theatre existance. This manifesto aims to argue out the transformation of the text in theatre causally. The manifesto which is a descriptive study through examples, shares the determinations regarding the transformation of the text in the art of theatre. The manifesto’s aim is to reach a detect of the textual side of today’s theatre, as a result of text comparing in dramatic theatre.
Exploring Dialogic Potential through Lexical and Grammatical Deviations in Shakespeare's Othello
The paper focuses on the monologues as well as dialogues of the protagonist Othello to see how effectively the lexical and grammatical deviations lead to dramatic effects. The critical analysis is led through the guidance of oratorical or rhetorical features of the speech acts. It is noticed that the linguistic deceptivity through the use of antimeria which refers to the use of one part of speech as another such as a noun as a verb; heterography which refers to spelling in which the same letters represent different sounds in different words or syllables; paraprosdokian i.e. a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence, phrase, or larger discourse is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe or reinterpret the first part; using disfluency features in expressions which are interruptions in the regular flow of speech, such as using uh and um, pausing silently, repeating words, or interrupting oneself to correct something said previously; use of run-on sentences and predicate-structure focus and grammatical incorrectness lead to cognitive manifestations and expressions of emphatic motives adding to the artistic height of the play.
The purpose of this paper is to show how recent research on the nature of dramatic language can further our understanding of the problematic nature of exporting Shakespearean texts on to the medium of film. This paper is written in three parts. The first part discusses the performance-orientation of dramatic language; the second part considers the possible choreography for spatial organization and kinesics suggested by dramatic language; the third part looks at some of the ways cinema neutralizes the performative potential of dramatic language. The central argument is that a successful modern-day adaptation of Shakespeare's plays will in some ways be hindered by the retention of the original script.