Caught on page! Micro and macro pragmatics of stage directions parentheticals in Tom Stoppard's Professional Foul

Abstract

This paper delves into Tom Stoppard's Professional Foul (1978) to probe the extent to which Stage Directions Parentheticals (SDPs) contribute to the pragmatic interpretation of the play, by reflecting the conversational attitudes of discourse participants and delineating different power relations at the character-character level of discourse (micropragmatics); and communicate authorial intentionality, by motivating a cognitive activity on the part of the reader's fictional participation at the author-reader level of discourse (macropragmatics). The paper's main objective is to explore the extent to which SDPs in a play-text pragmatically fulfill the role of theatrical performance. The study is grounded on a pragmatic analysis manifested in two analytical strands: micropragmatically, by drawing on two interpretative apparatus: Spencer-Oatey's (2008) model of rapport management and Culpeper's contributions on impoliteness (1996, 2007, 2011a); and, macropragmatically, by reflecting on van Dijk's (1980) concept of macrostructures of discourse, together with a special focus on Gumperz's (1982) notion of contextualization cues. Findings reveal that SDPs in Stoppard's play extend schematic assumptions on the part of readers that not only demarcate a particular range of appropriate conversational behavior, but also predict further interpretative meanings contributing to the understanding of the whole dramatic text.