Dialogue Structure in Modern French Plays and Spontaneous Conversation

An adaptation of Thomas Klammer's (1971) tagmemic model of dialogue paragraph structure was applied to five modern French plays and three cassette recordings of spontaneous conversation. The plays used were: Huis clos by Jean-Paul Sartre, Knock by Jules Romains, Les Bonnes by Jean Genet, Les Chaises by Eugene Ionesco, and La Belle de nuit by Pierre Wolff. They were chosen on the basis of their close resemblance to or deliberate deviation from actual dialogue and their limited number of speakers. Recordings were made of native French speakers in Paris, France interacting with the investigator. The model was used with the plays first as a stylistic tool to substantiate the findings of traditional criticism and add further insight into theme and characterization as reflected by the dialogue structure of each work. Secondly, the inadequacies of the model were pointed out in several examples drawn from the texts. Statistical comparison of the twenty-five utterance types occurring in each play was shown to account in part for variations in the playwrights' style. Similar analysis and statistical counts of the recorded conversation were carried out in order to ascertain the relationship between literary and actual dialogue. It was found that the structure of literary dialogue often closely approximates that of real conversation, especially in the proportion of certain response types made to the corresponding initiating and continuing utterances, Differences in the two types of dialogue may be accounted for either by a playwright's deliberate attempt to emphasize his theme through the speech of his characters or by what we term the "politeness factor" in actual conversation: recognition of the social constraints governing informal interaction between relative strangers.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

French

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• Snyder, April Falkin

• Language, Modern

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(UMI)AAI8108667

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/67928