Language Adaptation And Drama Stylistics

What is the idiosyncratic style manifested in individual drama works? The dissertation proposes a model of adaptive discourse-pragmatics for drama stylistic studies. It is based on a survey of the existent researches and accommodates the newest achievements in pragmatics and other related disciplines. Experimenting with the application of the model in interpreting the stylistic linguistic features based on the two Chinese spoken drama texts—Teahouse and Thunderstorm, the research aims at the enrichment of the pragmatic-discourse approach to meet the needs of scientific drama criticism, in order to satisfy the increasing demands for drama appreciation.English drama stylistics began from studying the phonological, lexical, syntactical and semantic features of drama excerpts and has only gradually developed to include the analysis of conversational structures. It evolves from the descriptive study to the interpretative investigation, with a gradual expansion of the research topics and deepening of the research discoveries. However, some problems also arise in the short history of drama stylistics and the newly revived modern stylistics.First, there exists the task of theoretical exploration on accesses to the discourse-pragmatic stylistics and there are debates on the practical solutions of the methodological problems involved in the studies. Many researchers are advocating the"tool-kits"concept for doing discourse-pragmatics, while other scholars contend the distinction of the discourse analysis and pragmatic analysis is necessary. To the researcher of this study, stylistics is both linguistic research and literary study, concerned with the practical issue of a linguistic interpretation of literary creation. How to make the best use of the discourse-pragmatic perspective and to find the useful model and mechanisms in drama language inference and art interpretation, so as to describe adequately the dynamic meaning system using efficient research scheme, are significant tasks to be accomplished.Together, discourse analysis and pragmatics have molded and are going to continue to contribute significantly to drama stylistic study. The researcher claims that the tool-kit is not too crammed but calls for a systematic coordination of the"advanced"tools and the invention of more of the tools from other relevant areas to realize the full potential of drama stylistics. Based on a review and evaluation of the existent researches in the drama pragmatic stylistics area, and a discussion of theoretical preliminaries, the research designs a synthesized multiple-layered framework that combines a multitude of novel ideas with the discourse-pragmatic approach of drama stylistic study. Analyzing the multiple meaning generating processes of drama utterances with the framework, the study provides a more sytematic, scientific and productive way of doing drama stylistics.Second, the domain for the application of stylistics is still limited, in the sense that drama stylistic studies on the non-English texts show a general shortage in their intensive employment of the research methods and analytical tools from the discourse-pragmatic tradition. For Chinese drama stylistics especially, original investigation and theoretical breakthroughs are in urgent need to redress the unbalance in critical opinions in the literary history. The solution of the problems with Chinese drama stylistics will surely contribute to the development of drama stylistics at home and abroad. The research collects data from the corpus of two famous Chinese spoken drama works of Teahouse and Thunderstorm, and investigate into the problem of how the linguistic correlates of phonological structures, syntactical structures, semantic presentations, speech acts, the pragmatic structures and strategies such as ambivalence, conversational strategy, have adapted dynamically to the communicative contexts of language users, including their mental world, social world, and their physical world to characterize the drama personae, to advance the drama conflicts, and to foreground the theme(s). Through analyzing the varied situations, doing comparisons and summarization, it is found, however, that the afore-mentioned aesthetic effects are the second-order effects or co-effects of the even more critical effects of contextualizing the language for drama receivers. By contextualizing of drama language, it is meant that a certain character, together with the dramatist who has created him or her, has chosen the most appropriate utterance, set against the most appropriate multi-layered contexts into which the utterance is embedded, for the generation of the literary meaning and aesthetic effects of the speech. The proper forms of the language contribute to the foundational literary functions of interactive communication and entertainment, mutual emotional and perceptional projection, and rhythmic prosody and echoing, to satisfy the characteristic intellectual and emotional appeals in the receptive end of drama communication. To conclude, the research has made three important findings:(1) The analytical framework for drama discourse-pragmatic style based on Verschueren's language Adaptation Theory has eliminated the limitation imposed artificially on the contextual elements, as well as the data source and linguistic structures to be examined. It investigates the artistic language communication from both the productive and receptive processes, grasping the spreading-across structural patterns in drama dialogues.(2) The pragmatic method of doing drama stylistics with a general perspective has borrowed widely from and coordinated the critical discoveries by researchers in textual linguistics, discourse analysis, linguistic pragmatics, cognitive pragmatics, critical discourse analysis, social linguistics and cognitive poetics, so as to build a link between modern applied linguistics and current tendencies and demands in the area of literary criticism. It offers an access to and provides a scientific basis for the original and independent critical opinion(s) on a literary work, which can be more rational and complete, rather than being impressionistic, absolute and biased.(3) The characters (and sometimes the playwrights who created them) in the two plays, Teahouse and Thunderstorm, adapt to each one's role as the specific language user, and to the role(s) of other participants of the communication events (their addressees in the play and the audience/reader outside the play), in making linguistic choices according to the contextual co-relates of the psychological world, social world and physical world. Besides the interactional and communicational context, their utterances and the interpretation by the receivers also adapt to the linguistic and pragmatic co-texts.The stylistic study for comprehending the play texts attains to the goal of making people encounter more of the"buried treasures"from the depth of the literary languages. The pragmatic styles that are reflected in the features of discourse or pragmatic mechanisms are unexpectedly varied in kinds, tangible for perception and impressive in effects. The phonological structures, lexical and semantic presentations, (functional) syntactic structures, super-sentential structures, modality expressions, thematic structures, speech acts, discourse types and the pragmatic principle and strategies, do not exist independent of each other, but are dependent on and coordinates with each other as a system. They embody the results of artistic language use in the process of choice-making, negotiability, adaptability and meta-pragmatic salience.To sum up, the language adaptional discourse-pragmatic approach to drama stylistic research based on two 20th century Chinese spoken drama texts reveals the nature of the multiple-layered adaptation process in the artistic creativity and reception activities. It advocates a reassessment of the values of traditional drama works. The widening of the aesthetic scope and a refined all-round grasp of a dramatist's style in a specific drama text is sure to shed new lights on the discourse pragmatic studies. The result is significant for further stylistic researches and the pedagogy, while translators of the play texts could also get helpful ideas to keep the original style.