Dialogue and Discourse (RLE Linguistics C: Applied Linguistics)
A Sociolinguistic Approach to Modern Drama Dialogue and Naturally Occurring Conversation
Routledge Library Editions: Linguistics Series

This book is based on a close study of modern drama texts. In the first section ? Dialogue ? it studies specific drama texts. Drama has been neglected by linguistic studies of literature, and this book develops a new area of literary-linguistic stylistics. It demonstrates how recent advances in the sociolinguistic analysis of conversation (discourse analysis) can account for readers? and audiences? intuitions about dramatic dialogue. The second section ? Discourse ? uses these studies to develop a powerful and general model of spoken discourse. As well as accounting for the utterance-by-utterance organization of dramatic texts, it provides a descriptive model for the analysis of naturally occurring conversation. Literary texts and natural conversation are used to illustrate each other.

1. Dialogue 1. The Stylistic Analysis of Modern Drama Texts: Some Background Remarks and a Practical Example 2. A Stylistic Study of Ionesco’s The Bald Prima Donna 3. A Stylistic Study of Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter 4. From Dialogue to Discourse and Back Again 2. Discourse 5. The Alienated Analyst: An Argument for Rich Data for the Discourse Analyst 6. The Linguistic Analysis of Spoken Discourse 7. Towards an Analysis of Casual Conversation 8. Suggestions for Further Research