Script and Interactive frame

SAs performed by characters in literary as well as drama-cinematic texts are always sensitive to context, and herein lies the major problem with the implication of Austin’s (1962) and Searle’s (1969) SAT in stylistics analysis of such texts: SAT ignores the role of context to support SA production, uptake and interpretation (Levinson, 1979; Culpeper and McIntyre, 2010). Thus, SA analysis of such texts, as Culpeper and McIntyre (2010:187) argue, tends to be ‘atomistic’ as the contextual features are imported in a rather ad hoc way.

In order to amend such limitation and make the SAT more applicable to stylistics analysis of drama-cinematic texts, Culpeper and McIntyre (2010) suggest Levinson’s ‘activity types theory’ (1979) as this shows how SAs constitute context. They also maintain that the contextual approach of activity types is entirely suitable to dramatic texts as they create their own contexts (Culpeper and McIntyre, 2010:187).

Having its origin in prototype theory (see 2.5.2) Levinson (1979) defines an activity type as:

[…] a fuzzy category whose focal members are goal-defined, socially constituted, bounded, events with constraints on participants, setting, and so on, but above all on the kinds of allowable contributions. Paradigm examples would be teaching, a job interview, a jural interrogation, a football game, take in a workshop, a dinner party and so on (p. 368).

Drawing on an example from Levinson (1979), Culpeper and McIntyre (2010) highlight that in the context of the courtroom, many questions can be understood as SAs of accusation. It is ‘the knowledge of the interactional norms’ of courtroom-type activity that enables a person to infer that a question may not be merely a question, and thereby, activity types, like SAs, are limited in numbers, and many activity types cannot be categorised into existing categories. Culpeper and McIntyre (2010) envisage a schematic aspect for activity types, the ‘script’, which is knowledge about sequences of related actions that we encounter frequently, such as going to the pub or a restaurant (Schank and Abelson, 1977, see also 2.5.1). Such a script (schematic) approach assumes that readers/viewers activate expectations about the default social roles which are appropriate to a particular setting. Furthermore, by adopting such a view toward activity types, this allows us to consider different variations of a specific activity type.

Another related concept, which emphasizes the role of context in the comprehension and interpretation of interaction(s) is Tannen’s (1993) interactive frame. By using the term frame, Tannen integrates both a sociological and a psychological sense of the term: the former is informed by the work of Goffman (1974) who develops the theoretical foundations of frame analysis to illustrate how people use multiple frameworks to make sense of events. The latter, the psychological sense, refers to the notion of knowledge and expectation structure, which has been variously labeled in different related disciplines: script in artificial intelligence (Minsky, 1975; Schank and Abelson, 1977), schema in cognitive psychology (Rumelhart, 1975) and frame in cognitive linguistics (Filmore, 1975) and is widely referred to schema (see 2.5.1).

According to Tannen (1993:60) interactive frame refers to a definition of what is going on in a particular interaction, without which no utterance can be interpreted:

In order to comprehend any utterance, a listener (and a speaker) must know within which frame it is intended: for example, is this joking, is it fighting? […].

In fact, the interactive frame determines the context in which the interaction is taking place, and thus, contributes to the recognition of the types of SA performed in discourse. Although both terms (interactive frame and activity type) may refer to the same concept, interactive frame, as the term implies, presupposes the expectations and prior knowledge of interactants in a particular context, and unlike activity types, there is no need to treat them as schemas. Furthermore, interactive frames are more flexible than activity types, as there is no formal categorization for them. Such adaptability allows us to envisage numerous interactive frames. Thus, any interactive event can be considered as an interactive frame, in which the interactants’ roles are inferable.

People identify frames in interaction through linguistic and paralinguistic cues (Tannen, 1993). SAs function as paramount linguistic cues which determine the interactive frame within which the interaction is set. Similarly, the interactive frame contributes to the realization of the illocutionary force of the SA. In the case of indirect SAs, for example, when a chain of pragmatic inferences is involved in arriving at the intended SA, the interactive frame contributes to the realization of the intended force. The following example shows how the interactive frame of invitation helps us to understand the speaker’s illocutionary or intended force:

A: Are you free tomorrow evening? B: Yeah, I think so, why?

A: Have you seen Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris? B: No, but I heard it’s a great movie.

A: I’ve got an extra ticket for tomorrow evening’s show. B: That’s great. Thanks.

In this fabricated example, A invites B to join him to watch the film. Instead of asking her directly ‘would you like to come with me?’ he puts his invitation in a declarative ‘I’ve got an extra ticket’ (which is not a typical form of invitation) to decrease the amount of threat associated with direct question of invitation. The illocutionary force of invitation is based on the earlier preparatory questions posed by A. In fact, by asking whether B is free and whether she has seen Woody Allen’s film, A

negotiates the SA value of the utterance by asking seemingly innocuous questions. These preparatory questions act as the ‘precondition header’ (Schank and Abelson, 1977) (i.e. the textual cue which causes the activation of the relevant frames or schemas) and thus, underpin the SA of invitation. Based on B’s schematic knowledge and the communicative presumption or the mutual knowledge by which A can distinguish the intended illocutionary force, A recognizes the interactive frame of invitation and perceives B’s utterance of having an extra ticket as the intended force of an indirect SA. In other words, by informing A that he has an extra ticket (the preparatory condition), A gives B linguistic cues to signal the interactive frame of invitation in which the SAS of invitation is recognized by B and accepted. Thus, the SA and the interactive frame mutually contribute to the recognition of the illocutionary force by B: by recognizing the interactive frame, the intended SA can be detected and vice versa.

Similarly, within the interactive frame, viewers make inferences about characters and their social roles (functions) and activate expectations about their default social roles. For example, the interactive frame of interview gives rise to some general expectations, not only about the role of interviewer and interviewee, but also more detailed expectations about those roles. For instance, age, class, and social functions are key as the interviewer, as the dominant figure, is usually older, from a higher social class, asks questions about the interviewee’s background and qualifications, and, although the interviewer takes fewer turns, they hold more power. The interviewee is usually younger, and, due to their role, as the one seeking a job, holds less power. Such schematic inferences are significant parts of characterization. However, such schematic roles may be manipulated to create foregrounding effects, which in turn can lead to incongruity and absurdity, which is a typical function of literary texts (Cook, 1994; Jeffries, 2001; see also 2.5.1)1.

Considering the limitations of classic SAT outlined in 3.2, and taking into account the multimodal aspects (paralinguistic, cinematic and film stylistic devices) which can contribute to SA production and comprehension, and the context, as an important element in uptaking and understanding SAs and their intended illocutionary

1 _{Drawing on an extract from Chapman et al. (1990), Jeffries and McIntyre (2010) demonstrate how the}

textual cues give rise to an interactive frame of interview and how the default roles of interactants deviate from readers’/viewers’ expectations to achieve a dramatic effect.

forces, a cognitive model for SAS – particularly for interpreting SAs in film discourse – is suggested in the next section.