DIALOGUE

A model for the analysis of dialogue comprises two principal methodological orientations. 

1. Structure: A focus on the way spoken discourse is structured; on how it is organised in a linear fashion and how its various components are bolted together. A structural analysis of discourse thus seeks to explore the connection (or sometimes, lack of connection) in dialogue between questions and answers, statements and acknowledgements, requests and reactions, and so on. 
2. Strategy: The study of discourse in terms of strategy. Here attention is focussed on the way speakers use different interactive tactics at specific points during a sequence of talk. The axis of selection forms a strategic continuum ranging from ‘direct’ to ‘indirect’, along which different types of utterances can be plotted in terms of their varying degrees of politeness. 

Characterisation is created through patterns of language and to highlight the points of departure and/or intersection between the discourse world of the play and the discourse situation of the world outside the play.

A. The strategies of dialogue:

 

Analyzing play dialogue in terms of discourse strategy often involves cross-reference between the character level and the higher-order interactive level of playwright and audience/reader. 

The ‘Theatre of the Absurd’: The tradition of absurd writing is characterised by a preoccupation with the apparent futility of human existence, and this often manifests in play talk that, when compared to the sociolinguistic routines of everyday verbal interaction, stands out as deviant, anti-realist or just plain daft. o 

From N. F. Simpson’s absurdist play One Way Pendulum, a courtroom has been hastily assembled inside a domestic living room to facilitate Mr. Groomkirby’s ‘swearing in’ ceremony: 

The Usher enters followed by Mr. Groomkirby, whom he directs into the witness box. Mr. Groomkirby takes the oath. Mr. Groomkirby: (holding up a copy of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’) I swear, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Judge: You understand, do you, that you are now on oath? Mr. Groomkirby: I do, m’lord. 

A courtroom is institutionally sanctioned to deal exclusively with legal proceedings, and is manifestly not the sort of thing that can be set up by anybody in a domestic living room. Furthermore, although Mr. Groomkirby’s ‘swearing-in’ contains many instantly recognisable formulaic structures such as ‘ . . . the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth . . .’, the use of Uncle Tom’s Cabin clearly violates the pragmatic conditions which govern this ritual. 

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. 

B. 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 investigates a number of play texts using a variety of different models in conversation analysis and speech act theory. Her book culminates with a lengthy breakdown of Harold Pinter’s play 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. 

In ‘I want to ask you something’, Gus attempts to initiate an exchange , 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 permission 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?’. 

Concerning characterization, the unequal statuses of the participants, she argues, are reflected in the structure of dialogue 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.

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 conversational 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 the structures Burton uncovers in play talk become messages about those characters at the level of discourse between playwright and audience.

http://educationcing.blogspot.com/2012/

Monologue

In theatre, a monologue is presented by a single character, most often to express their mental thoughts aloud, though sometimes also to directly address another character or the audience. Monologues are common across the range of dramatic media (plays, films,^[1] etc.) as well as in non-dramatic media such as poetry.^[2] Monologues share much in common with several other literary devices including soliloquies, apostrophes, and aside. There are, however, distinctions between each of these devices.

Similar Literary Devices

Monologues are similar to soliloquies, apostrophes, and asides. Nevertheless, meaningful differences exist among them. For example, a monologue is distinct from a soliloquy because the latter involves a character relating his or her thoughts and feelings to him/herself and to the audience without addressing any of the other characters. A monologue is the thoughts of a person spoken out loud.^[3] Monologues are also distinct from apostrophes, wherein the speaker or writer addresses an imaginary person, inanimate object, or idea.^[4] Asides differ from each of these not only in terms of length (asides being shorter) but also in that asides aren't heard by other characters even in situations where they logically should be (i.e. two characters engaging in a dialogue interrupted by one of them delivering an aside).^[5]

A soliloquy (from Latin: "talking by oneself") is a device often used in drama when a character speaks to himself or herself, relating thoughts and feelings, thereby also sharing them with the audience. Other characters, however, are not aware of what is being said.^[1][2] A soliloquy is distinct from a monologue or an aside: a monologue is a speech where one character addresses other characters; an aside is a (usually short) comment by one character towards the audience.
Soliloquies were frequently used in dramas but went out of fashion when drama shifted towards realism in the late 18th century. Today, Korean screenwriters often insert brief soliloquies in Korean drama. Queen In-Hyun's Man is a good example.
 

Apostrophe (figure of speech)

Apostrophe (Greek ἀποστροφή, apostrophé, "turning away"; the final e being sounded)^[1] is an exclamatory rhetorical figure of speech, when a speaker or writer breaks off and directs speech to an imaginary person or abstract quality or idea. In dramatic works and poetry written in or translated into English, such a figure of speech is often introduced by the exclamation "O".

Examples

• "God deliver me from fools." English proverb^[2]
• "Where, my death, is thy sting? where, O death, thy victory?" 1 Corinthians 15:55, Saint Paul of Tarsus
• "O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, / That I am meek and gentle with these butchers! / Thou art the ruins of the noblest man / That ever lived in the tide of times." Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 1
• "Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee! I have thee not, and yet I see thee still." Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 1
• "To what green altar, O mysterious priest, / Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, / And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?" John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
• "O eloquent, just, and mighty Death!" Sir Walter Raleigh, A Historie of the World
• "Roll on, thou dark and deep blue Ocean -- roll!" Lord Byron, "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage"
• "Thou glorious sun!" Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "This Lime Tree Bower"^[3]
• "Death, be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so", John Donne, "Holy Sonnet X"
• "And you, Eumaeus..." the Odyssey
• "O My friends, there is no friend." Montaigne, originally attributed to Aristotle^[4]
• "Ah Bartleby! Ah Humanity!", from Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville
• "O black night, nurse of the golden eyes!" Electra in Euripides' Electra (c. 410 BCE, line 54), in the translation by David Kovacs (1998).
• "Then come, sweet death, and rid me of this grief." [(Queen Isabel in Edward II by Christopher Malowe)]
• "O happy dagger! This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die." Romeo and Juliet (V, iii, 169-170). 

An aside is a dramatic device in which a character speaks to the audience. By convention the audience is to realize that the character's speech is unheard by the other characters on stage. It may be addressed to the audience expressly (in character or out) or represent an unspoken thought. An aside is usually a brief comment, rather than a speech, such as a monologue or soliloquy. Unlike a public announcement, it occurs within the context

“

A little more than kin, and less than kind.

”

This technique has frequently been used in film comedy, for example in the Bob Hope "Road" comedies, Woody Allen comedies and in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

 

Don't Make Your Audience Run Away

                After teaching your students about the some basic expressions, you should ask them to study about the intonation.  Imagine if the actors are on the stage with the flat dialogues, what will the audience do? They will close their eyes and have a dream or run away from you. 

         How can we do to make the audience still stay behind the seat until the end of the show? 

         Right, the actors should have various intonations to make their performance alive as if the situation were the same as the reality.

          What is an intonation?

          Based on Halliday and Greaves, they have made some specific types of meanings, and all of them can be achieved through intonation. They are textual, interpersonal, and logical. They said;

One of the most powerful dimensions of systemic functional linguistics has been its recognition of the spoken features of rhythm and intonation (prosody) as grammatical. Thus, far from being simply paralinguistic, prosody serves to systematically realize meaning in all three metafunctions of language: Ideational, where language construes experience; Interpersonal, where it enacts relationships; and Textual, where it engenders discourse. (LONDON: EQUINOX. 2008. PP. IX, 224. CD ROM)

Let’s discuss one by one meaning based on Halliday and  Greaves:             
1. Textual meaning means: related to the real meaning, the language to its ever changing context.           
2.  Interpersonal : allowing us to enact our social exchanges with others.                                               3.  Logical: construing the logic through which we represent the world we live.  

Besides, we should pay attention to pitch control. What is a pitch control? Why should we care of that stuff when we do a drama?

Based on Wikipedia, a pitch means:

Pitch is a perceptual property that allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency-related scale.[1] Pitches are compared as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies,[2] which require sound whose frequency is clear and stable enough to distinguish from noise.[3] Pitch is a major auditory attribute of musical tones, along with duration, loudness, and timbre.( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_%28music%29 )

In American English, there are four levels:              
1. Low         : this is at the end of the utterances   : this is for weak emotion.   
                                                                                                     

2.Middle      : this is for normal conversation : it can show a weak emotion if it stars from the middle to low.

                           
3. High         : this is for the end of yes-no  questions.
                         
4 . Very high : this is for normal conversation, for strong emotion or to emphasize. If it starts from very high to low, it shows an 
 enthusiasm  or  sarcasm, if it ends to low.

Besides, we have to pay attention to ‘a glide.’ In linguistics term, the definition of ‘a glide’ is:

a less prominent vowel sound produced by the passing of the vocal organs to or from the articulatory position of a speech sound.

 (http://www.orbilat.com/General_References/Linguistic_Terms.html).

Then we should know about ‘diphtong.’ The definition of a diphthong is:

A gliding monosyllabic speech sound (as the vowel combination at the end of toy) that starts at or near the articulatory position for one vowel and moves to or toward the position of another;  2. digraph; 3. the ligature a and e joined together (æ) or o and e joined together. 

(http://www.orbilat.com/General_References/Linguistic_Terms.html)

The diphthong consists of two  (http://www.orbilat.com/General_References/Linguistic_Terms.html ) :

1.    The falling diphthong: a diphthong composed of a vowel followed by a  less sonorous glide. Such as: ei, ou, ai, au, ɔi (face, goat, price, mouth and choice vowels)

2.    The rising diphthong: a diphthong in which the second element is more sonorous than the first. Such as: hideous, easier, luckier, colloquial, theoretical (based on John well’s article about The Rising Diphthong)

John Well also gave an example of the script from Shakespeare’s plays. The title was Hamlet. Here is:

Have of your audience been most free and bounteous                                              And call the noblest to the audience,