ABSTRACT
Since language and gesture, as the media for expression of the fictional context, are the most immediately recognisable of the elements of drama, a great deal of analysis has been done on both: on language mostly by literary theorists, on gesture mainly by theatre practitioners. Currently, theorists are attempting to find paradigms which can cope with the many simultaneous dimensions and functions which operate as language and gesture: among them semiotics,1 sociolinguistics2 and ethnography.3 The trouble which semiotics has found, referred to in the Introduction, is that language in drama is so polyfunctional that analysis quickly becomes incomprehensibly obscure to anyone but the analyst, or turns into counting sand-endless and useless. Some progress has been made by those who have chosen to make language and gesture the centre of their concentration, but that is frankly beyond the scope of this book. In all drama, language and physical action are polyfunctional, multi-dimensional, with all their constituents dependent on each other; furthermore, in process drama those constituents are constantly being renegotiated. To boil these down to one chapter is to do them a disservice; to do otherwise is to unbalance the book entirely. Accordingly, the disservice which I will do is to isolate and concentrate on one dimension as if it had an existence independent of all the others. A dimension particularly relevant to the scope of this book is that of purposiveness-within the range from the functional to the aesthetic-since this dimension crosses contextual boundaries.
