Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

Uncle Tom’s Cabin
clearly
violates the pragmatic conditions which govern this ritual. These conditions, known
as 
felicity conditions
(Austin 1962: 39), proscribe the swearing in of a witness by
anything other than a designated religious text – irrespective of its literary merit.
What operates in the discourse world inside the play, then, is thoroughly at odds
with the sanctioned routines of the world 
outside
the play.
As a footnote to this commentary, it is worth noting how the judge expresses 
no surprise at the general procedures of Groomkirby’s swearing-in ceremony. Were
the judge to have outlawed 
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and declared the swearing-in 
inadmissible, as presumably any judge in the ‘real’ world would do, then this appeal
to everyday modes of conduct would have lessened greatly the absurdity of the
sequence. The responses of interlocutors at the character level to something that 
is unanticipated at the higher-order interactive level, such as the Judge’s reaction 
to Mr. Groomkirby’s use of 
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, is often an important index of
dramatic genre. Absurdist, as opposed to realist, drama tends to make use of a special
kind of incongruity that comes from a mismatch between communicative strategy
and discourse context, often deriving from fictional speakers 
not
observing the
familiar or expected routines that are cued by everyday discourse contexts. And these
incongruities often have humorous outcomes (see further A12).
The structure of dialogue
One of the most significant studies of the structures of play talk is Deirdre Burton’s
book on dialogue and discourse (Burton 1980). Burton investigates a number of 
play texts using a variety of different models in conversation analysis and speech 
act theory (see for example C5). Her book culminates with a lengthy breakdown of
Harold Pinter’s play 
The Dumb Waiter
(1960) using a single model of discourse 
structure, although it has to be said that the more eclectic chapters leading up to 
this analysis offer rather more stylistic insight than this longer analysis. That aside,
the thrust of her structural analysis is very much in keeping with the rationale of
stylistics in that it seeks to base interpretation on rigorous and retrievable methods
of analysis.
As an illustration of the sorts of issues Burton’s study raises, consider the following
short extract from 
The Dumb Waiter
:
GUS:
I want to ask you something.
BEN:
[no response]
BEN:
What are you doing out there?
GUS:
Well I was just -
BEN:
What about tea?
GUS:
I’m just going to make it.
BEN:
Well go on, make it.
GUS:
Yes, I will.
(cited in Burton 1980: 161–2)
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The point of Burton’s structural breakdown of this passage is to uncover patterns of
dialogue which serve to delineate character. For example, in ‘I want to ask you some-
thing’, Gus attempts to initiate an exchange (see A9), although Ben fails to provide
the anticipated second part to this. Furthermore, Gus’s initiation is couched 
in the form of a discourse act known as a 
metastatement
. Metastatements work 
as organising devices, but function more as ‘language about language’ than as 
information-carrying units of discourse in their own right. This request for permis-
sion to hold the floor is of course rebuffed by his interlocutor, who immediately
initiates his own ‘question and answer’ exchange which this time does elicit a reply
from his interlocutor. It is noticeable that Gus is prevented from finishing his reply
before Ben opens up a new ‘request and reaction’ type exchange with ‘What about
tea?’. And so, across many speaker turns in the play, this pattern of exchanges
becomes established into a consistent design in discourse structure.
Burton draws a number of conclusions from this design, but the most important,
as noted earlier, is to do with characterisation. The unequal statuses of the partici-
pants, she argues, are reflected in the structure of dialogue (1980: 70). On the one
hand, Ben is the dominating interactant, the confident director of operations and
persons, although there are occasional sequences of talk where his frailer side comes
to the fore. Gus, in spite of the odd battle for superiority, is the inferior interactant
who as ‘victim’ gains audience sympathy by the end of the play. Interestingly, Burton
makes a number of connections between the structure of Pinter’s dialogue and that
of adult-to-child interaction. The means by which Ben for example asserts his conver-
sational dominance bears much similarity to the patterns other researchers have
uncovered for the way adults interact with children. Gus’s attempts at initiation, by
contrast, resemble those of children who also tend to be less successful initiators of
conversational exchanges. The overall point is that, in keeping with the schema devel-
oped in A9, the structures Burton uncovers in play talk become messages about those
characters at the level of discourse between playwright and audience.
Summary: recent developments
Published over two decades after Burton’s study, Culpeper’s study of language and
characterisation continues the tradition of exploring plays using stylistic and prag-
matic models of discourse (Culpeper 2001). Concentrating particularly on the
language of Shakespearean plays, Culpeper criticises traditional approaches to char-
acterisation in literary criticism which tend to ‘humanise’ fictional characters as if
they were real people in the real world. He argues that the discussion of characteri-
sation in literature needs to be conducted with a firm grasp both of stylistic research
on dialogue and also of relevant aspects of social psychology. It is this orientation
towards social psychology that takes the study of discourse into a new territory, where
the sorts of analyses undertaken across this thread are supplemented with ideas from
cognitive linguistics. Culpeper points out for example that the process of inferring
character from text relies in part on the cognitive structures and inferential mecha-
nisms that readers have already developed for real-life people (2001: 10). This
emphasis on the cognitive dimension in textual interpretation reflects a more recent
general trend in modern stylistics, a trend which is the focus of the next unit.
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DEVELOPMENTS IN COGNITIVE STYLISTICS
This unit offers an opportunity to firm up the broad ideas sketched in A10 by
targeting more specifically some important developments in cognitive stylistics.
Shortly, we will look at one of the main models in Artificial Intelligence (hereafter
AI) to have found its way into this branch of stylistics. This theory has provided an
insightful method for accounting for how we draw on stores of knowledge, and how
we make conceptual transfers between these stores, when reading literary texts. Later,
the emphasis shifts away from conceptual transfer to the idea of conceptual tracking.
With specific reference to narrative, attention focusses on how we organise, retain
and follow certain types of mental representation when reading fiction. Across the
thread in C10, a range of activities are developed which apply and test these models
of analysis.
Schema theory and discourse deviation
The adaptation by stylisticians of the AI model known as