Diction

6 Key excerpts on "Diction"

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  Playwriting

  The Structure of Action, Revised and Expanded Edition

  • Sam Smiley(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  E I G H T Diction . . . if you make it up instead of describing it you can make it round and whole and solid and give it life. You create it, for good or bad. It is made; not described. It is just as true as the extent of your ability to make it and the knowledge you put into it. Ernest Hemingway, “Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter” Diction refers to all the words a playwright uses to make a play. Just as a wooden frame, a piece of canvas, and quantities of paint are the materials a painter uses to make a painting, words are a writer’s materials. For a writer, words are only a means to an end, the creation of the play as art object. More specifically, Diction in drama is the material of thought. Thoughts in characters within plots must exist before words can be put on paper. Dialogue in drama is a means of expressing thoughts that characters employ as they partici-pate in an action. Because Diction is subsumed to plot, character, and thought in drama, playwrights normally compose scenarios before they write dialogue. Of course, words are essential for the best drama. Thus, playwriting is a making with words. The simplest definition of Diction is patterned words. A playwright selects, combines, and arranges groups of words in speeches that within a play perform certain functions. Although the playwright puts the words together, what each character says depends on what that character feels and thinks. Dialogue, then, is expression in words. 183 184 Principles of Drama The Problem of Expression A playwright’s first concern is the problem of expression. With every project, writers make a series of choices to establish principles of selection and arrangement of the words; then they proceed to write consistently within the limitations of those principles. In order to ar-rive at such stylistic choices, a writer considers the context into which each word must fit. In drama, four major determinants make up the overall context.

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  Speaking Culturally

  Language Diversity in the United States

  • Fern L. Johnson(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Obviously, attribution of meaning then frames subsequent verbal (and physical) action. The Language System in Its Communicative Contexts 39 Analysis of pragmatics as a language system helps us understand many of the ways in which language-in-use leads to communication difficulties between individuals who are members of different speech communities. Dialects and Registers for Language Use Language situates identities, which can be understood in the metaphoric statement, You are what you speak. What a person speaks generally reveals two important dimensions, that of identity and that of situated activity. Dialects and Identities The term dialect refers to the variety of language that is spoken based on a person's social identity, for example, social status, educational attainment, ethnicity, race, regional background, and native language. For a dialect to exist, the language patterns for a group of people must be distinctive in contrast to those patterns found in other groups. The boundaries between one dialect and another are made up of bundles of isoglosses—those features that mark the distinctiveness. Dialects are linguistically patterned by phonology, syntax, and lexicon and morphology—alone or in combination. Taking regional dialects as an exam-ple, variations in the phonological systems typical of speakers from southern Texas and upper Maine are recognizable to most people, whereas lexical differences may be less well understood, as in the case of the word used to refer to a carbonated beverage, which is soda in the Northeast, tonic in some parts of eastern New England, and pop just about everyplace else. Phonologi-cal differences within the same native language can create communication problems or misinterpretations. The speech of most whose origins are in the Caribbean islands will systematically delete the -g from the -ing endings of words, producing doin and wonderin rather than doing and wondering, even in formal contexts.

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  Voice Interaction Design

  Crafting the New Conversational Speech Systems

  • Randy Allen Harris(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Morgan Kaufmann

    (Publisher)

  — Samuel Butler The cardinal focus of voice interaction design, Diction , is a matter of finding the words that accomplish the job most fitly and aptly, which means knowing the words — how they sound and, as we’ve investigated in this chapter, how they function. The idea is to stock the system vocabularies with words that are acoustically distinct enough from each other to minimize confusion, and acoustically robust enough in themselves to give the recognizer something to bite into. Oh, and they have to represent the register, too. But that’s not so easy, so we need to calibrate both our choices and the resolution strategies with a very thor-ough knowledge of lexical usage patterns, prominently including networks of associated words. The traditional device for plumbing word usage has been the Dictionary, but Diction-aries provide little more than rough sketches of a given word’s functional range. Those sketches can certainly be useful, but they are far too preliminary for voice interface needs. Coming at Diction from the side of meaning, thesauri are also generally useful instruments. They are more than adequate for the Diction concerns of writing and speak-ing most of the time. But for designing speech-system behavior, they provide little more than early-phase brainstorming material, or suggestions to follow up with more sensitive tools. In recent decades, however, these traditional instruments have been supplemented by an incredible new digital tool, one indispensable for voice interaction design, just as it is indispensable for speech recognition and natural-language understanding, the corpus . Corpora quickly reveal broad swatches of two critical types of information about words, collocation and colligation . Both types tell you about the habitual company words keep: the first tells you the general company, the other words they tend to travel with; the second tells you about specific company, the other words they line up along side of.

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  Conversation Analysis

  The Sociology of Talk

  • Donald Allen, Rebecca F. Guy(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Any alternative approxi- VOCABULARY ANALYSIS 97 mation of the word is necessarily less adequate for defining its meaning. Language-in-use has served extensively as a basis for evaluating social and personal characteristics in psychological, anthropolog-ical, and sociological investigation through pencil and paper tests, questionnaires, interviews, direct observation, and personal documents. In recent years, more attention has centered on socio-linguistics (Grimshaw 1969: 312), the process of verbal interaction (Bales 1970), and the generation of social roles through speech (Bernstein 1964: Goffman 1961). Bernstein notes, for instance, that If ... the communication system which behaviorally defines a given role is speech itself, it should be possible to distinguish critical roles in terms of the speech forms they regulate (1964: 255). And the problems of resolving the implications of the speech pro-cess are not simple. There is a disagreement about what the word, the basic linguistic unit, is. Osgood states that no generally accepted and satisfactory definition exists, and some linguists deny the validity of the word altogether, relegating it to folk linguistics (1965: 66). Yet the word is accessible as a discriminable element in both oral and written word sequences, and the want of an acceptable definition need not inhibit research effort. In the present context we define the vocabulary list as the alpha-betically ordered set of words and word-like utterances emitted by a speaker in simple conversation. The vocabulary includes basic words and their variants, such as variation in number and tense, in conventionalized spelling, word fragments, proper names, laughter conventionalized as an exact series of ha's, space fillers conventionalized as ah and mm, and throat clearing conventionalized as ghm. All of the variant forms have been included in order to provide a veridical vocabulary of oral conver-sation.

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  Discovering Sociolinguistics

  From Theory to Practice

  • Dick Smakman(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Terminology is introduced to refer to types of language use, both by groups and individuals, and the chapter explains the various connotations each term has. The coming into existence of the lan-guage shapes as well as how they interrelate (and often overlap) is explained as well. The important category of dialects is discussed next: how they are embed-ded in society, how their shapes and interpretations change, how they have been researched so far, and which new types have arisen. 3.2 Ways to refer to language use systems 3.2.1 Terminology The choice of terms to denote language signifies the author’s stance or approach to the language or language-related topic that they are describing. Some ways to refer to systems of using the available language tools (which could be called ‘language use systems’) denote ways that groups of speakers speak. Other ter-minology refers to more individual language use systems. Some terminology emphasises variation within the language of groups and of individuals, while other terminology presents language as a fixed system and pushes the impor-tance of intra-speaker and inter-speaker variation to the background. 3 Language Variation The Many Shapes of Language 24 LANGUAGE VARIATION The word ‘variety’ is possibly the most-used term that refers to ways to use language and is a neutral way to denote the language use system to which individuals and groups adhere. A variety is typically a language that can be identified by speakers themselves and by others as being distinct in subtle or not so subtle ways from other varieties. The term can be used generically to avoid unwanted distinctions between less codified and more codified lan-guages (‘dialects’ and ‘standard languages’ are all ‘varieties’, and so are, for instance, occupational varieties involving jargon). Some of the terms include the syllable ‘lect’, which refers to a set of linguis-tic phenomena that can be recognised as an entity.

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  An Introduction to Sociolinguistics

  • Ronald Wardhaugh, Janet M. Fuller(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Languages, Communities, and Contexts Part I An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Eighth Edition. Ronald Wardhaugh and Janet M. Fuller. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Companion website: www.wiley.com/go/wardhaugh8e 2 We stated in the introductory chapter that the concept of language is considered by many sociolinguists to be an ideological construct. Further, we noted that all languages exhibit internal variation, that is, each language exists in a number of varieties and is in one sense the sum of those varieties. We use the term variety as a general term for a way of speaking; this may be something as broad as Standard English, or a variety defined in terms of loca- tion and social class (e.g., ‘working-class New York City speech’), or something defined by its function or where it is used, such as ‘legalese.’ In the following sections, we will explore these different ways of specifying language varieties and how we define the terms ‘lan- guage’ and ‘dialect’ (regional and social). We will also address how the associations between language and social meaning develop and are used in communicating in different speech contexts. What is a Language? What do we mean when we refer to a language or, even more important, the idea of mixing languages? As we will discuss further in chapters 8 and 9, recent research has coined many new terms to describe what has traditionally been called multilingualism – ‘(trans)lan- guaging,’ ‘metrolingualism,’ ‘heteroglossia.’ These terms reflect the idea that languages are ideological constructs; while we (usually) have names for different ways of speaking and can describe their features, in practice linguistic boundaries may be fluid.

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