ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the effects created by two contrasting modern drama texts, in terms of recent work in spoken discourse or conversational analysis in the hope of showing how useful this work in naturally occurring conversation can be for the stylistician. Whilst it seems clear that discourse is certainly the appropriate level from which to approach an understanding of the effects in the dialogue and similarly that it is indeed an illuminating and practical base from which to discuss simulated speech, several problems, some of them familiar to linguistic-stylisticians, have begun to emerge. Some are more serious and theoretically important than others. Another perennial stylistics problem is closely associated with the question of length, but has more serious theoretical issues contingent upon it; namely the inevitable limitations of any selective study of a text, if this work is undertaken under the auspices of linguistics rather than the traditionally more casual approach of literary criticism.
