Cover not available

Article published In: English Text Construction
Vol. 11:2 (2018) ► pp.200–225

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

The textual analysis of dramatic discourse revisited

Linguistic layers and the (social) semiotics of play-constitutive and play-realisational elements

 | Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt
 | Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt
Published online: 19 October 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.00009.jam
Abstract
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 1978. Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London: Arnold.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) 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 (46)
References
Alter, Jean. 1981. From text to performance. Poetics Today 2 (3): 113–139. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Aston, Elaine & George Savona. 1991. Theatre as Sign-System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baumbach, Sibylle & Ansgar Nünning. 2009. An Introduction to the Study of Plays and Drama. Stuttgart: Klett.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bigley, Bruce. 1977. The Playboy of the Western World as anti-drama. Modern Drama 20 (2): 157–167. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bliss, Alan. 1971. The language of Synge. In J.M. Synge Centenary Papers, 1971, Maurice Harmon (ed.). Dublin: Dolmen Press, 35–62.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Burton, Deidre. 1980. Dialogue and Discourse: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Modern Drama Dialogue and Naturally Occurring Conversation. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Crawford, Nicholas. 2008. Synge’s Playboy and the eugenics of language. Modern Drama 51 (4): 482–500.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
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. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2001. Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts. Harlow: Pearson Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan & Dan McIntyre. 2006. Drama: Stylistic aspects. In Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, vol. 31, Catherine Emmott (ed.). Oxford: Elsevier, 772–785. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Elam, Keir. 1980. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Feng, Zongixin & Dan Shen. 2001. The play off the stage: The reader-writer relationship in drama. Language and Literature 10 (1): 79–93. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gavins, Joanna. 2007. Text World Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grandage, Sarah. 2016. Dramatic discourse. In The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics, Violeta Sotirova (ed.). London: Bloomsbury, 646–670.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1978. Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London: Arnold.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Herman, Vimela. 1995. Dramatic Discourse: Dialogue as Interaction in Plays. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hickey, Raymond. 2007. Irish English: History and Present-Day Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ionesco, Eugene. 1958. Four Plays, Donald M. Allen (trans.). New York: Grove Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
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. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 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.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kiberd, Declan. 1993. Synge and the Irish Language. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Klarer, Mario. 2004. An Introduction to Literary Studies. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2005. Postdramatic Theatre, Karen Jürs-Munby (trans.). London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
L’Hôte, Emilie. 2003. Translating life – J.M. Synge’s literary representation of Hiberno-English. M Ling thesis, Université de Lyon.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Macrae, Alison. 2014. Stylistics, drama and performance. In The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics, Michael Burke (ed.). London: Routledge, 253–267.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mandala, Susan. 2007. Twentieth-Century Drama Dialogue as Ordinary Talk: Speaking Between the Lines. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McIntyre, Dan. 2006. Point of View in Plays. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pavis, Patrice. 1985. Theatre analysis: Some questions and a questionnaire. New Theatre Quarterly 1 (2): 208–212. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1988. From text to performance. In Performing Texts, Michael Issacharoff & Robin F. Jones (eds). Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 86–100. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pfister, Manfred. 1993. The Theory and Analysis of Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
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. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 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.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Spacks, P. M. 1961. The making of the Playboy. Modern Drama 4 (3): 314–323. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stockwell, Peter. 2002. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stoppard, Tom. 1968. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. London: Faber and Faber.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Synge, J. M. 1993 [1907/1904]. The Playboy of the Western World and Riders to the Sea. New York: Dover.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Watson, George J. 1979. Irish Identity and the Literary Revival: Synge, Yeats, Joyce and O’Casey. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Werth, Paul. 1999. Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

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. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 9 december 2025. 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.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue