Dramatic Discourse

Dialogue as Interaction in Plays

Vimala Herman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415082419
• eBook ISBN: 9781134668397
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Whilst poetry and fiction have been subjected to extensive linguistic analysis, drama has long remained a neglected field for detailed study. Vimala Herman argues that drama should be of particular interest to linguists because of its form, dialogue and subsequent translation into performance. The subsequent interaction that occurs on stage is a rich and fruitful source of analysis and can be studied by using discourse methods that linguists employ for real-life interaction. Shakespeare, Pinter, Osborne, Beckett, Chekhov, and Shaw are just some of the dramatists whose material is drawn upon. Each chapter contains a theoretical section in which major concepts of each framework are explained before the relevance of the framework to dramatic discourse is analyzed and explored using textual examples. This book will be of interest to undergraduates and postgraduates studying in the areas of literary linguistics and stylistics, or anyone specialising in the relationship between the text and performance.

Chapter 1
The ethnography of speaking

SCENES OF SPEECH

One of the major distinctions to be made in the study of language as spoken discourse is that speech is always contextually ‘situated’ and occasioned: it occurs among specific participants, who use speech for various purposes, in certain settings and across various spans of time. Utterances exist and function within their situations of utterance which are in turn embedded in ‘contexts of culture’. Utterances are thus always embedded in situations, within cultures, and are open to various social and not grammatical meanings alone. Moreover, they function within larger units like speech events or communicative events as they have also been termed. The co-ordinates of speech events are complex and comprise the basic prerequisites that determine speech use. The model chosen to explore the influence of such parameters on interaction comes from the sociolinguistic perspective, more precisely from the Ethnography of Communication. The range of factors that need to be accounted for is best summarized by Dell Hymes’ (1972) mnemonic of SPEAKING. The following is a slightly revised version.

S (situation)	1.	setting
	2.	scene
P (participants)	3.	speaker or reader
	4.	addressor
	5.	hearer or receiver or audience
	6.	addressee
E (ends)	7.	purposes-outcomes
	8.	purposes-goals
A (act sequence)	9.	message form
	10.	message content
K (key)	11.	key
I (instrumentalities)	12.	channel
	13.	forms of speech
N (norms)	14.	norms of interaction
	15.	norms of interpretation
G (genres)	16.	genres

(Duranti 1985:209)

The sixteen components characterize the complexity of factors involved in the notion of situated speech and provide the circumstantial and material elements that configure such events. Speech is functional in these events, and Hymes’ model is but the most recent of a long line of investigation into language as a functional phenomenon, which did not focus on the grammar alone. Malinowski (1923) included magical and ritual functions of speech. Karl Buhler (1934) used the grammatical system of persons derived from the rhetorical grammar that preceded Plato, in which the speech scene was seen as a drama basically between the first person (speaker) and the second person (addressee). The third person referred to all else. Jakobson (1960) included six functions—the referential, the conative, the expressive, the poetic, the metalingual and the phatic. Hymes’ model attempts to capture the insights from all these forebears since speech is multi-functional in context. The ‘etic’ grid was supplied for use and adaptation on ‘emic’ levels—to analyse the specificity of any speech event under investigation. The notion itself, it must be borne in mind, captures the components of a context of communication in abstract mode, and is a term with a reality in the analyst’s descriptive framework. As Duranti notes:

we should not expect to find speech events out there in the world, in the same way we should not expect to find sentences, predicates or adverbs in texts. We only find linguistic signs that can be classified in terms of such analytic frameworks. We do expect, however, to use the notion of speech event to make sense out of discourse patterns found in verbal interaction.

(Duranti 1985:201–2)

It must be added that overlaps among the categories are also possible.

Speech events occur within contexts, an immediate context of situation, within the wider context of culture. The cultural load on the context of situation in which speech is used can be considerable, even if unconscious, since it includes all the ‘knowledges’ that native speakers may be assumed to draw upon in order to communicate and use language coherently and appropriately in the multifarious situations in which they perform (Lyons 1977:611). The notion of linguistic or speech community has been invoked; a difficult notion, which attempts to ensure that language, cultural norms and modes of evaluation used are in common between or among participants in a speech event. But ‘language’ does not exist in uniform mode in cultural contexts, for there is usually variation in speech types and forms in any society. Dialects, accents, registers, pidgins, creoles, multi-or bi-lingualism and diglossia complicate the notion of a unitary or holistic speech community, as do international varieties of the same language with their own histories and cultures and national boundaries—British English, American English, Australian, West Indian, Nigerian, Indian English, for instance. As a general definition, Hymes proposes the following:

Tentatively, a speech community is defined as a community sharing rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech, and rules for the interpretation of at least one linguistic variety.

(Hymes 1972:54)

Given, however, that there can be differences among groups regarding ‘norms’ as Victor Turner (1984) noted, and that problems may arise in cases where interaction is between participants who may speak the same language, but whose cultural codes for speaking are different (for example, where the language used is the first language for one speaker and a second language for the other), or that speaking rules may be similar across contiguous areas, but languages or dialects may be different, Hymes qualifies the above definition by drawing on some related notions—the language field, the speech field and the speech network. The former refers to the ‘total range of communities within which a person’s knowledge of varieties and speaking rules potentially enables him to move communicatively’. The speech network operates within the speech field, and defines ‘the specific linkages of persons through shared varieties and speaking rules across communities’. Given that individuals in communicative contact may affiliate only in overlapping fashion rather than in some total fashion within and across sub-groups, Hymes proposes a more delimited scope for the notion of speech community:

one’s speech community may be, effectively, a single locality or portion of it; one’s language field will be delimited by one’s repertoire of varieties; one’s speech field by one’s repertoire of patterns of speaking. One’s speech network is the effective union of these last two.

(Hymes 1972:55)

Speech resources are not in common even if the language is shared. The potential for conflict is as much a reality as the potential for harmony in communication, since not every member has equal access to the speech networks or speech patterns in a community. The scale of linguistic repertoires can be limited or broad. In the cultural politics of speaking, control of speaking norms is as important as command over the rules of the grammar, in terms of access to contexts and with respect to conduct once within them. Moreover, different styles of speech can acquire affective and aesthetic values in a community, where some styles or manners of speaking are regarded as more persuasive or pleasing than others. Even quantitative characteristics like amount, duration or length of speech can be assessed qualitatively. Fluency, verbosity, pithiness, laconicity, will be differently graded as more or less desirable in different communities and even in different situations. Styles may differ according to sex —men are expected to be more voluble than women in power-driven contexts; or according to situation or formal convention in ritual speech events where discursivity may contrast with reticence; styles of performance may alternate between elaboration or sparseness, or according to status—some cultures give equal weight to valour in war and eloquence in speech in assessing their chiefs. The Bella Coolans privilege fluent, witty talk, while the democratic culture of the Gbeyas does not privilege verbal facility unduly. The value placed on witty talkers, the raconteurs, the verbal duellers, the experts of understatement or eloquence, reveals the value of the aesthetic dimension in speech in everyday use. The negative values imposed on other styles is the reverse of the same coin. Given such enormous variety and asymmetry in the use of resources, Hymes’ notion of the speech community and the speech event attempts to ensure some common ground, since such is required for successful communication, without homogenizing the concept of a speech community or undermining the possibilities for miscommunication.

If the notion of speech community caters for the social resources which may be utilized in language use, the notion of speech event focuses especially on those situations whose activities are constituted by or governed by speech, where speech plays an essential, constitutive part of the activity. Speech events are distinguished from speech situation, which is used in a more technical and restricted sense by Hymes than would appear at first sight. It refers to situations in which speech plays a secondary role to other activities: for instance, chatting to someone while on a journey, or a bicycle ride, as opposed to a debate or an argument in which speech plays a primary role.

Hymes’ ‘etic’ grid could be seen as static if the fact that speech events are dynamic enactments, and activity-based, is forgotten. The relationship between speech and context is reciprocal, reflexive and flexible, not unidirectional (Auer 1992). Although the kind of speech required in a context may be constrained, it is the issue of appropriate speech within it that makes the context what it is. Events are enacted, and speech both creates and is created by the context in which it functions. The relationship is a vital one. Participants use ‘contextualizing cues’ (Gumperz 1982) in order to make available relevant aspects of context to each other—and cues can be quite varied, including pronominal usage and address forms that frame and mark status, code-switching, prosodic variation, and nonverbal signals like gaze, body posture, etc., to signal either response or shifts of direction in interaction. These cannot be specified in advance; they belong to the contingencies of the interaction itself. Abstract social directives have thus to be enacted in situ, as forms of social praxis; typifications of behaviour must be made particular and interpretable within the contingencies of the interaction itself. As Auer notes, being a doctor does not mean having the relevant qualifications alone; nor being a patient being physically present in a doctor’s surgery. The complementary role relationships have to be actualized through enactments of them within the incidentals of the situation itself—for instance, who the patient is, what the complaint is and how doctor and patient actually interact with each other can change from case to case. Moreover, role relationships can change—the participants can switch roles to that of being neighbours for a time, without changing the fact that the event is, basically, a medical consultation (Auer 1992:22).

Certain things are thus ‘brought along’, others are ‘brought about’ and have an endogenous, emergent character. Presuppositions on the part of participants about appropriate behaviour, derived from cognitive frames or schemata as some term them, or what Gumperz (1992) terms activity types, which are conceptually typified representations of activities as sociocultural knowledges, are constantly being evoked and constrain interpretation of whatever is in progress. Interpretations of current activity can be revised, consolidated or changed as they are being enacted. Whereas sociocultural knowledge enters interactions via such frames or activity types, activity is constrained, but not determined by them (ibid.: 45). Such activity constructs enable appropriate attention to be given to the organizational requirements of speech events, but they can also be seen as members’ and analysts’ constructs which underwrite the generation of inferences for interpretation. The processes involved in inference generation have been comprehensively examined by Sperber and Wilson (1986). Contexts in the cognitive sense, therefore, are in a constant state of flux during interactions, even when other aspects remain seemingly stable. These different facets of context—as space-time-participant co-ordinates that indexicalize speech, as sociocultural activity constructs, and as the space and processes of cognitive and inferential activity—come together in instances of language-in-use in interactions.

Of the eight major components of the SPEAKING model, the first two are concerned with the spatio-temporal setting in which speech occurs among the particular participants who are involved in the speech event, since speech does not reside in a grammar or on a page alone, but is produced by someone, for or to someone, in time and space. The others deal with various aspects of the use of speech, the medium. The component of situation is sub-divided into setting and scene which recognizes that verbal interaction is a spatio-temporal event and that time and place can influence speech activity. Certain kinds of speech activity are expected in bounded spaces and culturally endorsed places—in church, in court, in the drawing-room, the shop or the street. Scene refers to the psychological orientation and accounts for the identification or acceptance of a conventional or traditional definition of a certain occasion as itself. It also covers shifts in psychological direction when interactions change from formal to informal or when a conversation which started off as an informal chat develops into an argument or a quarrel. In plays, a change in ‘scene-orientation’ is required when there are indications that a time span has elapsed between the last (dramatic) scene and the current one, for instance.

The setting thus involves not only the actual physical setting, but also the psychological orientation to the activity in progress, and the cognitive uptake via inference and continuous categorization of what is going on. This is necessary since the actual physical setting can change while the verbal activity remains the same—one may keep conversing while leaving one’s place of work, while driving home, and continue the conversation within the home. The physical setting can thus tightly or very loosely constrain the kind of activity in progress.

On the other hand, the activity can be varied and the setting remain the same. In shopping precincts where buskers occasionally perform, the organization of the setting is purely internal, cognitive and scene-orientated. A performer space is divided from the audience space which is self-selected spontaneously. Shoppers generally respect the arrangement and avoid or skirt around the performance space as they go about their own business. They rarely cut across it, although the precinct is ‘theirs’ as shoppers. Institutional or formal settings are far more restrictive in the kind of activity permitted. Physical setting can also signify certain functional or attitudinal requirements of participants, as when chairs are arranged in a circular pattern for a meeting or a talk. The division of space hierarchically into a raised podium and rows of chairs signifies something else about the relationship between the occupiers of these spaces.

As for the second component, participants, the dyadic structure of speaker-hearer related to the first and second person in the grammar is the unmarked norm. In actual fact, participant structures in speech events are far more complex than this. Goffman (1979) split the speaker or producer role into three subcategories— since the speaker need not be the source of the message, only its transmitter—and the recipient’s role into four, given that hearers may be addressees for whom the message is intended and those who are not the speaker’s official or ratified targets. Levinson (1988), systematizing Goffman’s insights, provides a comprehensive set of participant roles for speaker and addressee positions divided into four main categories—participant producer roles, non-participant producer roles, participant and non-participant reception roles. The producer roles are further sub-categorized according to whether the producer of the message is present in the speech event and a participant within it, whether the speaker is the source or originator of the message to whom motives and consequences for speech could be assigned, whether the form of the message is that of the speaker’s, and whether the speaker is the actual transmitter of the message.

Different combinations of these decompose the producer’s role in different ways. The canonical speaker is one who would have all these attributes—who would be participant and transmitter of speech to whom motive and form can be assigned. The other roles, which include those of ghostee, ghostor, spokesperson, relayer, deviser, sponsor, would vary along one or other of these dimensions. The spokesperson, for instance, could not be assigned personal motives for the speech that is transmitted; the relayer, if merely transmitting someone else’s speech, does not have control over the form of the message either. If speakers in a speech event may not ‘own’ their speech in all cases, there are other instances in which the producers are actually not even in the speech event itself—...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1 THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF SPEAKING
• CHAPTER 2 ETHNOMETHODOLOGY AND CONVERSATION ANALYSIS
• CHAPTER 3 TURN SEQUENCING
• CHAPTER 4 PRAGMATICS
• CHAPTER 5 GENDER AND LANGUAGE
• BIBLIOGRAPHYs