Context of Study

1.1 Context of Study

The twentieth- century witnessed an unprecedented upheaval in all kinds of disciplines, especially in the linguistic branches to inform further extensive studies in the literary writings. In any literary work, the linguistic interpretation helps to reveal its meaning, even though all readers might not arrive at the same meaning, but still these divergent views and interpretations unveil hidden layers of meanings and open the textual scope for a deeper investigation. Halliday supports the fact that part of the task of linguistics is to describe texts; both prose and verse, and analyze them using the existing methods of linguistics. He adds: "this is true even in the study of literature: the more rigorous and objective linguistic methods have come, the more they have thrown light on the literary use of language and on the patterning and impact of particular literary texts" (p. 5).

Therefore, the corpus of the present study is selected from literary discourse, particularly drama. The bases for the selection of drama script for a pragmatic analysis as opposed to other literary genres are justified on the following grounds:

1. Drama is one of the main genres in literature which is rich and full of strenuous linguistic analysis, because drama scripts represent remarkable versions of natural occurring talk as well as non verbal props. Moreover, drama dialogue represents conflict on the part of the interactants- though fictitious- who tend to assert their personalities, insult or ignore each other, behave impolitely, create obstacles that hinder communication and so forth. Then, drama data serves as a catalyst in linguistic writings and discourse analysis. Burton (1980) asserts that: "Drama data forces the analyst to re-examine his taken-for-granted assumptions, and provokes powerful and fascinating insights into everyday conversational structures" (p. 116).

2. Another reason highlighting the richness of drama is that it exploits different levels of language. Many texts may provide strange or odd conversation offering a powerful source of insights into naturally occurring conversation per se, without any prior dependence on notions of institutionalized situations hindering the communicative function of the theater. That's why plays "are valuable literary genre... they have to be concerned with human interaction, and have to be realized by human dialogue"