Communication in Drama: a Pragmatic Approach

Book excerpt: COMMUNICATION IN DRAMA: A PRAGMATIC APPROACH is a book based on the authors research work in theatrical communication. Theatre has its own language. The verbal and non-verbal communication operating in the theatrical context is a central concern of this book. The book offers an authentic view to explore numerous intricacies of communication in drama using Pragmatics as a perspective. Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics. It basically studies the use of language in various contexts pertaining to real-life communication. However, the communication in drama differs from the communication in real life. Drama is scripted and performed in the multivalent contexts of real life and theater at the same time. At the backdrop of such contextual dynamics, the existing analytical models of communication in Pragmatics are observed to have their own shortcomings, since they are basically evolved to analyze the communication in real life and not in drama. Hence, peculiarly to assess the speech situations in drama, the author has evolved a new pragmatic-analytical model in this book. The new model is authenticated by using it to analyse five milestone Indian plays in English. Precisely, the book is a pragmatic analysis of communication in drama.