A Pragmatic Approach To Dramatic Text

As the title of the book suggests, it attempts a pragmatic approach to analyze extracts from some literary works of the dramatist, Elizabeth Henley. The main objective of the book is to show the significant role of pragmatic analysis in clarifying the linguistic behavior of language users in the process of communication as a whole. Moreover, it aims at specifying the study of the language of literature. It demonstrates how pragmatic tools are very beneficial when applied to the analysis of verbal interaction in literary works, especially drama. In the analysis, some pragmatic approaches, as Grice's theory of Conversational Implicature and Brown and Levinson's Politeness Principle, are applied to Henley s Abundance, Impossible Marriage, and Signature. The choice of that American female playwright is due to her position as a prominent contemporary female dramatist, and her distinctive use of language, as well. While the reasons for choosing those plays are that they haven t been analyzed before and they are rich with the linguistic behaviors and they are rich with the linguistic behaviors and verbal interactions among the characters that have been helpful to the analysis.

Autorentext

Hind Heikel is an English Lecturer, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Translation, EGYPT. She has been teaching English for adults since 1998 in different places: governmental and private universities; language centers, Axon, Amideast and American University in Cairo (0ff-campus program. She got her Ph.D. in September 2011.