'The linguistic characterisation of the major dramatic genres' (original) (raw)

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.

Exploring the Language of Drama From Text to Context

This book is designed to help students to explore the language of dramatic texts through the approach usually known as ‘stylistic analysis’, an approach which is already well-established for the analysis of poetry and prose fiction (see, for example, this book’s companion volumes: Twentieth-century Poetry: From text to context, edited by Peter Verdonk, and Twentieth-century Fiction: From text to context, edited by Peter Verdonk and Jean Jacques Weber). How does the stylistic analysis of drama differ from the stylistic analysis of poetry or prose? Let’s explore this issue through an example.

Characterisation -an intrinsic aspect of dramatic text

A playwright creates a play text with many inherent parts like plot, character, idea and language. Among these parts, characterisation is an important aspect as it helps to further the plot, to express idea and contribute to spectacle. A playwright creates character appropriate to the play and according to the dimensions in which it revolves such as physical, social, physiological and spiritual dimension. Therefore this study explores the process of character development by the play wright in the dramatic text and perseverance of this character construct in performance.

13-17 Stylistics in language and literature.pdf

VEDA PUBLICATIONS, 2018

Language as we all know is an important or should I say an indispensable tool for human communication as it is through language that knowledge is transferred, meaning is created and understood ensuring social as well as scientific development of human society. It’s true not only for speech but also in writing, both being two of the most potential uses of language. After becoming a university subject in 1960s English language has being the target of literary critics. They have accused the linguists for being too dry when it comes to analysis of a piece of writing. And the linguists have accused the literary scholars for being to subjective, imaginative unambiguous for the same task. To bridge the differences or the gap between the two, stylistics a branch of applied linguistics functions to analyse the use of language literary texts. However it's not limited to the study of literature alone but is also stretched to varieties of writings like texts related to media and journalism, the advertisements etc. This paper is an attempt to explore the link between language and its most creative use that is Literature. Through this paper I aim to show the features of language and creative uses under which these forms are put to appeal to human senses and make a piece of literature alive whether it's romance, tragedy or comedy.

Tradaptation of Dramatic Texts

This article deals with the feasibility of applying cultural translation studies approaches to intra-lingual adaptation of dramatic texts through the discussion of adaptation terminology, the interchangeability of adaptation and translation, and the relevance of combining both into " tradaptation ". The purpose is to study loose adaptations of dramatic texts, especially those of Shakespeare, following cultural translation studies principles. The study has shown that it is satisfactorily feasible to use inter-lingual translation principles, across the spectrum from strictly literal to loose free, and apply them to the intra-lingual adaptation of dramatic texts, with the example of The Al-Hamlet Summit as a main reference. Further studies can help attain substantial progress in the analysis of the concept of adaptation.

Language and Verbal Art Revisited: linguistic approaches to the study of literature

2007

The book will appeal to the growing number of scholars working in, and students needing to investigate, the field of literary linguistics, or stylistics. Thus it is meant for both specialists and non-specialists. The intended readership more particularly includes: our students of English linguistic stylistics at the University of Bologna’s Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature (in all 3 of our MA programs), for whom it would be required reading with strongly recommended purchase (approximate numbers yearly: 60). Many of the authors also assure me that the volume will be adopted in stylistics courses they periodically teach. The papers in the volume are on a wide variety of aspects of the language-literature connection, and approach it from a variety of perspectives. All include theoretical considerations and practical applications. Indeed, one of the book’s principle aims is to provide a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches to the linguistic study of literature, all of them firmly rooted in specific contexts of culture. This it does by hosting papers from scholars working within various grammatical and discursive frameworks, including SFL, pragmatics, corpus linguistics, ethnolinguistics, cultural and translation studies. It also aims at providing illustrative instances of the kind of work currently being done by researchers working in various parts of the academic world, (Europe, Australia, and Africa). Inclusion of a wide range of literary genres and world literatures is a further goal. To this end, the papers deal with, for example: Shakespeare’s plays; modern Austrian authors writing in German, such as Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Marlene Streeruwitz; Perrault’s Histoires et contes du temps passé and their translations by Angela Carter; the Spanish poets of the Generación del ‘50; Malaysian-Singaporean poets in English; Anglo-American Modernist poets (Frost, Stevens, Pound and D.H. Lawrence) and novelists (Woolf and Conrad); contemporary short stories by Marina Warner and Turkish-German narrative by Feridun Zamoğlu; The Gospel of St. John and Harry Potter. The main message of the volume is that, as Hasan has so succinctly put it, […] in verbal art the role of language is central. Here language is not as clothing to the body; it IS the body.” (1985/1989: 91), and that, as a result, any true ‘appraisal’ of the meanings of the literature text must address that language, with reference to the text’s specific ‘context of creation’. A further message is that, though all the contributors to the volume acknowledge this basic premise, there are a variety of linguistic theories and practices at our disposal for probing the language of verbal art. Separate introductions to each of the contributions will seek to guide above all the non-specialist reader by describing, contrasting and comparing the diverse frameworks that the volume comprises. For a similar purpose, a general introduction diachronically traces key moments in the development of the study of the language of literature seen as socio-cultural practice.

Corpus Stylistics in Contemporary English Dramas: Keywords and Semantic Fields of Delusions

GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies, 2022

As reflected through contemporary Anglo-American dramas, delusion is considered a repertoire afflicted by the societal depression after World War II. Since post-war depression can be vocally expressed, it poses a question of how the theme of delusion could be portrayed through emotive phrases and how they are interconnected with the literary themes in dramas. This study investigates semantic fields demonstrated through corpus-based methodologies on a collection of contemporary dramas via Lancsbox and Wmatrix. Ten contemporary British and American dramas are constructed as a specialized corpus to compare with the reference corpus, built upon BNC and COCA imaginative texts. The comparison can generate keywords, lexical bundles, shared collocates, and extract the words indicating what the specialized corpus is about, or “aboutness.” The meta-tiered results show that “Negative,” “Wanted,” “Getting and possession,” and “Diseases” are the fields that relate to the aboutness of the contemporary dramas. The top 20 keywords can refer to the specialized corpus’s dialogic structure and highlight four characters with dilemmas regarding the delusional disorder. The collocation network, measured by GraphColl, can raise stylistic awareness where these keywords and semantic fields are interconnected and substantiate the theme of delusion. Though literary texts are interpreted through close reading, this study argues that quantitative and qualitative aspects can be integrated to undermine the absence of positivism.

Stylistics and Linguistic Analyses of Literary Works

2019

A linguistic analysis of literature has caused debates among linguists and between linguists and literary critics. The debate among linguists occurs because they have different opinions regarding the nature of literary language, while the debate between linguists and literary scholars arises as literary scholars question the authority of linguistics to study literary writings. Therefore, in this paper I argue that the language of literature is similar to that of non-literary texts, and I also believe that because the centrality of language in literary writings, linguistics, as the study of language, has the authority to study literature. One linguistic approach to literature is stylistics, which studies the forms, functions, and meanings of literary language in a detailed and systematic way.