Authors
Abstract
n the recent years, the knowledge of stylistics has experienced some new branches. Thanks to the recent efforts of a group of linguists, traditional stylistics has changed its branches in favour of genres, rather than the types of prose and verse. Up until two decades ago, stylistics mainly focused on the form of the text, and the genres were almost ignored or overlooked. However, in the light of the studies of people such as Mick Short, Geoffrey Leech, Johnathan Culpeper, Elena Semino and some other linguists, now we are able to conduct research on the stylistics of short story, stylistics of novel, stylistics of poetry, and for sure, stylistics of drama. Stylistics of drama which is considered an interdisciplinary field of study between pragmatics and literary studies, gives numerous ways to analyze dramatic works. From these ways the most important ones are “turn-taking in drama” and ‘’speech acts’’ through which a more thorough understanding of the play is to be formed. As far as ‘’turn-taking’’ is considered, some factors like starting conversations, having more turns, having longer turns, interrupting other characters, appointing next speaker and appointing the subject of conversation are to be focused. In 1974, the underlying principles of turn-taking were first described by sociologists Harvey Sacks, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson in their seminal article named “A Simplest Systematic for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation,” which was published in the journal Language. Later on, issues such as Adjacency Pair, Back-Channel Signal, Conversational Grounding, Cooperative Overlap, Cooperative Principle, Discourse Markers, Listening and Repair were introduced, and dialogue analysis turned out to be a separate field of study. This new field also enjoyed some already established fields as well to continue its growth. These items were speech acts and performative sentences. Speech act is a technical term in linguistics and the philosophy of language. The contemporary use of the term goes back to J. L. Austin’ and J.Searl’s development of performative utterances and his theory of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. Speech acts are commonly taken to include such acts as promising, ordering, greeting, warning, inviting and congratulating. So, the Analysis of ‘’speech acts’’ necessarily includes all the five levels mentioned above, as well as the issue of power among the characters involved in a conversation. All the above mentioned issues have recently been employed in the analysis of drama, and new light has been shed in the literary criticism of a genre which provides excellent examples for dialogue analysis. In the current research, efforts have been made to make the best use of the techniques of the stylistics of drama to analyze one of the most striking plays of the contemporary Iranian playwright, Akbar Raadi, under the title Aheste Bâ Gol-e-Sorx (Slowly with Rose). The main objective is using the two ways mentioned earlier and to give a vivid stylistic illumination of the play. It will be seen that powerful and challenging characters are identifiable by studying above-mentioned factors, and the results have been presented in tables and charts for a better understanding.
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