Manipulation Of Turn-taking In Mrs. Warren's Profession

Turn-taking analysis is one of the methods developed in the relatively new field of drama stylistics,which is defined as the stylistic study of dramatic texts by applying discourse analysis theories and methods to the texts.Dialogue is the primary method of expression in dramatic texts and how the playwright describes the dialogues determines the success or the failure of a play.A turn is an utterance unit in spoken dialogue.And characters take turns in dialogue.Therefore,the author of this thesis finds it feasible to analysis drama from the angle of the turn-taking theory.Drama has been appreciated from a variety of perspectives,but it is never explicitly and systematically studied from the perspective of turn-taking theory,which could manipulate dialogues,and be powerful in organizing dialogues.This thesis reviews development of turn-taking theory and tries out turn-taking system and framework of turn-taking on Mrs.Warren's Profession,combined with recent study of systemic functional linguistics and dramatic stylistics,in the hope of interpreting what lies behind the conversations.Based on the turn-taking theory,this thesis adopts qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis so as to explain characterization,power relationbetween Mrs.Warren and Vivie.First,quantitative analysis of the drama text produces a visible data.Then,qualitative analysis of the data interprets characterization and power relationof the drama.Combining these two research methods is more objective and persuasive than just adopting one.The tables acquired after analyzing the dialogues in the drama demonstrate that the characterization in drama can be interpreted not only by the content of dialogues but also by turn-taking system proposed by Sacks et.al,which can be divided into turn constructional components,turn allocation techniques and turn control strategies.Turn constructional components of character can reflect the information of speaker‘s education,experience,family and profession.Turn allocation techniques can show speaker‘s intention and attitude,enriching characterization.Interruption and overlapping,two turn control strategies seldom appearing in drama,once appearing,must be delicately designed by the playwright to portray characterization.Second,power relation between characters can be analyzed based on framework of turn-taking in dramatic stylistics,which contains six parts: control of topic,turn length,turn type,interruption and monologue,turn control strategies and preference organization.Generally speaking,the powerful speaker at talk controls the conversation topic,has the most turns and the longest turns,uses terms of address nor marked for respect,interrupts others,and gives dispreferred answers.Three parts constitute this thesis: introduction,main body,and conclusion.The first part is introduction mainly filled with research status of turn-taking abroad and at home.In addition,the objectives of the study,methodology,data collection and significance of the thesis are involved as well in this part.The second part is the main body of the thesis,which can be further divided into three chapters.Chapter One reviews the related studies on turn-taking theory at home and abroad,in order to find out what previous achievements have been acquired and what problems are still left out.It focuses on historic studies on turn-taking and previous studies on Mrs.Warren's Profession.It builds up the theoretical framework for the study and first paves the way for the establishment of a framework with the theoretical preliminaries,then constructs the framework of turn-taking analysis for analyzing dramatic dialogues.Chapter Two focuses on turn-taking system proposed by Sack et.al,in which turn-constructional component,turn-allocation component,turn-taking rules and turn control strategies are expounded respectively.The first section analyses characters‘ turn-constructional components from four perspectives,which are single-word turns,single-phrase turns,single-clause turns and turns of sentences.The complexity of characters‘ turn-constructional components can reveal the characters‘ educational background.The second section employs turn-allocation techniques combined with turn-taking rules to analyze a piece of dialogues happening in ACT IV to present their characterization through the conflict between Vivie and Mrs.Warren.The third section mainly focuses on two kinds of turn control strategies: interruption and overlapping,because interruption and overlapping seldom occur in the drama.If they do occur,they are carefully designed by the playwright.Chapter Three uses the proposed framework of turn-taking to reveal the power relationbetween characters and appreciate the theme in Mrs.Warren's Profession.The proposed framework is revised on the basis of Yu Dongming‘s,containing control of topics,turn length,turn-type and the preference organization.The piece of text is chosen to be analyzed from Act Two when Vivie found out Mrs.Warren‘s profession and she had a stormy quarrel with her mother,because it is the climax of this play and it reflects the oppression of women under the capitalist system.It can be further divided into four sub-topics,which are Vivie‘s accusation of Mrs.Warren‘s profession,Mrs.Warren‘s defense for herself,Mrs.Warren‘s statement of her past and reconciliation between Vivie and Mrs.Warren.These four sub-topics correspond to each section in Chapter Three.By the means of quantitative and qualitative analysis,each section tries out the proposed framework and draws on sample dialogues from the text as evidence,to test for the descriptive and explanatory adequacy of turn-taking.This thesis ends with Conclusion,which summarizes the researching findings mentioned above on the basis of manipulation of turn-taking in Mrs.Warren's Profession.It points out the creating goal of this thesis.And in the meanwhile,the limitations exist in the thesis and the suggestions for the subsequent exploration are also concluded in this part.In addition,there also exist the necessities and the significance of adopting the turn-taking theory to analyze the literary works in this part.The English learners should be able to understand this drama from a new angle of the distinctive features in the language.Therefore,the aesthetic values of Mrs.Warren's Profession can be appreciated and accepted widely.