Dialogue and discourse (rle linguistics c:

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.