Discourse analysis, pragmatics and the dramatic ‘character: Tom Stoppard's Professional Foul

Abstract

Is there any way in which characters in dramatic texts may be considered a worthwhile object of criticism? The dearth of recent critical material in this area would suggest not, but the aim of this article is to demonstrate that the study of dramatic character may be effectively achieved by the application of theoretical principles derived from the linguistic analysis of conversation. The difficulties of accounting precisely for how readers of the play text get from the words on the page to judgements concerning the ‘personalities' of characters are overcome, to some extent, by the analysis of their conversational behaviour and using the powerful interpretative apparatus of discourse analysis and pragmatics to this end. As a focus for discussion, the character of Anderson, in Stoppard's play, Professional Foul, has been chosen, and a wide range of approaches taken from discourse analysis and pragmatics is used to identify in particular scenes the ways in which four prominent character traits are deducible from his conversational behaviour. The analysis begins with an examination of turn-length, turn-taking and topic-shift before applying pragmatic theories such as Grice's Cooperative Principle, Brown and Levinson's Politeness Phenomenon and Leech's Politeness Principle. In addition, this article addresses the problematic notion of character ‘development’ and argues that this may be accounted for in terms of a change in the conversational strategies used by a character, from which changes in attitude are inferable.