Textual Stratification and Functions of Orality in Theatre

Mathilde Dargnat (1)

1 ATILF - Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française

In this chapter, I examine how a spoken variety of French is used in a corpus of five plays by the Quebecois writer Michel Tremblay. I mainly address two problems. First, I study the way in which general social and literary ideas about language work as filters on the represented linguistic usage. Second, the writer who uses a more or less fictional spoken language in his texts can, in contrast, transcribe also a more standard linguistic usage. Then, he can linguistically differentiate between several character types, according to social (i.e. lower vs. upper class) or metaliterary criteria (i.e. the position of the speaker in the enunciative stratification of the text). The latter point raises the problem of the linguistic marking of characters' fictional status. The present study, which is based on selected texts, touches more generally on the issues of literary categorization and textual representation of the linguistic variation and, in this respect, goes beyond the initial corpus. It pertains to the articulation between linguistic analysis and theories of literature, which is crucial for the translation of texts combining several registers.

Dans cet article, j'étudie les moyens linguistiques pour structurer l'énonciation textuelle.

Domaines: Linguistique; Littératures

Mathilde Dargnat. Textual Stratification and Functions of Orality in Theatre. Jenny Brumme & Anna Espunya. The Translation of Fictive Dialogue, Rodopi, pp.81-99, 2012, Approaches to Translation Studies, 9789042035041. ⟨hal-00545970⟩