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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2011
Dramatic language and ordinary language
The overlapping of two levels
What dramatic speech shares with ordinary speech in an everyday dialogue is the fact that it is intimately bound up with the immediate context or situation that the participants in the dialogue find themselves in. This sets both of them apart from the varying degrees of situational abstraction that is characteristic of narrative or expository speech. Dramatic speech is nonetheless ‘semantically much more complex’ than speech in an ordinary conversation because inherent in the former there is
… yet another factor: the audience. This means that to all the direct participants of the dialogue is added another participant, silent but important, for everything which is said in a dramatic dialogue is oriented towards him, toward affecting his consciousness.
However, the semantic complexity of dramatic speech is not the result of its orientation towards the receiver alone, but also of its orientation towards the sender. This again results from the overlapping of the internal and external communication systems: a dramatic speech does not only have two addressees; it also has two expressive subjects. One is the fictional expressive subject manifested in the dramatic figure, and the other is the real expressive subject, namely the author.
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