The Application of Discourse Analysis to Drama: A Cross-cultural Approach

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This paper aims at briefly demonstrating how the major procedures of discourse analysis (i.e. speech acts, presuppositions, and the cooperative principle in conversation and general discourse relations) may be fruitfully applied to drama dialogue. Such a kind of purposive approach, in turn, makes it rather reasonable to distinguish between literary criticism and theatrical analysis, but not so that one is deemed to be superior to the other. “Co-operative Labour Division” is crucial because a production of a play is in effect “a play–an interpretation of it”. In terms of this context, literary criticism should also take the text as its object of investigation and develop techniques of textual analysis to cope with the implied aspects embedded within a set of linguistic or sociological conventions. All this does suggest that the most important sets of linguistic conventions for interpretation are those which govern language use. This effect means treating the text as a series of communicative acts, not just as a configuration of elements belonging to various levels of language.

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Speech acts , politeness , Tu , Vous , Cordelia , King Lear , cross , cultural

Mediterranean Journal Of Humanities

239

Mediterranean Journal Of Humanities