Dramatic discourse: Dialogue as interaction in plays By Vimala Herman (review)

384LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) Hyatt, Harry Middleton (ed.) 1970-78. Hoodoo—conjuration—witchcraft—rootwork. Beliefs accepted by many Negroes and white persons. These being orally recorded among blacks and whites. 5 vols. Hannibal, MO: Elgin Hyatt Foundation. Krapp, George Philip. 1924. The English of the Negro. American Mercury 2.190-95. Rawick, George P. 1972-79. The American slave: A comprehensive autobiography. 10 vols. 1972. Supplement , series 1, 12 vols., 1977. Supplement, series 2, 10 vols., 1979. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Schneider, Edgar. 1989. American earlierBlack English: Morphological and syntactic variables. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Viereck, Wolfgang. 1988. Invariant be in an unnoticed source of American Early Black English. American Speech 63.291-303. Department of English Duke University Box 90015 Durham, NC 27708-0015 [RonButters@aol.com] Dramatic discourse: Dialogue as interaction in plays. By Vimala Herman. London & New York: Routledge, 1995. Pp. x, 331. $69.95. Reviewed by Agnes Weiyun He, State University ofNew York, Stony Brook This book focuses on 'modern discourse frameworks for the different kinds ofillumination they offer with respect to the workings ofdramatic speech in plays' (17). It contains an introduction and five substantive chapters, each of which reviews literature in some approach to discourse studies and subsequently applies it to language use in dramatic texts. Designed to be 'inter-disciplinary' (17), this book is meant to be appreciated by readers interested in theories and applications (especially applications in dramatic contexts) alike. The introduction chapter states the purpose of the book, discusses such notions as dialogue, discourse, interaction, conversation and utterance, and situates drama in the context of social life but with its own specificities. It provides a contextual view of speech in drama which emphasizes that while dramatic discourse transforms written language to speech, it is more than recitation of the written texts, as it recreates situations jointly achieved by the participants and as it involves nonverbal resources. The introduction names the approaches to discourse which the rest of the book will survey and apply—ethnography of speaking, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, Gricean pragmatics, speech act theory, politeness theory, and gender studies —but does not explain what problems or phenomena in dramatic discourse motivate the use of these approaches. The strongest chapter is Ch. 1 ('The ethnography of speaking'). It details Dell Hymes' SPEAKING model and the concept of speech event and uses these notions as tools to delineate the context of drama. It raises interesting questions such as how deixis anchors the participants within the spatiotemporal coordinates of speech events; how space and time are verbalized in drama to serve as two grammatical coordinates that ground speech; how setting integrates with participant framework as some contexts define the participant roles that are appropriate to them; how agency, liability, and distribution of participant roles are managed in drama; how fictional time and audience time are grammaticalized in/through drama; and more generally, how discourse/interaction and performance/reception mutually embed each other: These various issues are richly illustrated with works by both classical and contemporary dramatists. The goal of Ch. 2 ('Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis') and Ch. 3 ('Turn sequencing ') appears to be to summarize the major findings ofconversation analysis (CA) and to examine how some of the conversational structural mechanisms work in drama. Ch. 2 reviews literature and focuses on turn-taking; Ch. 3 concentrates on various sequence organizations. Compared with other chapters, the survey of literature in these two chapters is sketchy. Key concepts such as turns, turn-taking, and turn-constructional-units are explained not through the original CA REVIEWS385 work (e.g. Sacks et al. 1974 is conspicuously missing in the references) but largely via Levinson 1983. The value of these chapters lies in their attempt to apply a discourse approach which has so far been used in examining naturally occurring spoken data to an investigation ofpre-scripted, tidied-up language use in plays. It is useful here to make a distinction between language use in the performance of plays characterized by actual, recordable, transcribable, analyzable, moment-by-moment interaction and language use in the original play scripts which contain imagined, yet-to-be-vocalized, written dialogues without specification ofdetailed conversational features such as breathing, stress, pitch...