Implicatures in Altfatah Nando’s Short Movie Terlanjur Mencinta

YouTube has been flooded with contents within a movie genre, mostly the products by junior creators. It is therefore important to appreciate their works to maintain their creativities and innovations. Positive responses to such literary works are also required to improve their quality writing. The current study was aimed at identifying and at the same time construing the implicatures found in each act of the movie entitled “Terlanjur Mencinta” directed by Alfatah Nando. George Yule’s pragmatic theory (1996) was used in relation to implicatures caused by conversational maxims (Grice, 1975) supported by linguistic evidence-based contextual interpretation, namely utterances and stage directions. Findings show that generalized conversational implicatures were identified, namely 12 implicatures in which 42% was due to violation of manner maxim, 33% attributed to that of relation maxim, 17% due to that of quantity maxim, and 8% due to that of quality maxim. In addition, 4 conventional implicatures were found in the monologue. The study concludes that the implicatures can be easily understood through the contexts of situations. It is recommended that future researchers can formulate the ideal proportion and distribution of implicatures in a particular text in terms of quality, employing comparative rhetoric and a special research instrument.

O komizmie w dwu staropolskich dramatach sceny popularnej: „Tragedia żebracza nowouczyniona” (1552) oraz „Mięsopust abo Tragicocomaedia” (1622)

The aim of the article is to compare two old-Polish dramas of the so-called “popular scene”, and thus point to the directions of evolution of carnival representations in the former Polish Nobles’ Republic. The first work comes from the mid-sixteenth century and is characterised by a simple story. The second , written in the first half of the seventeenth century, has a vast plot and much more extensive stage directions. By contrasting both the story and the type of heroes and the way of constructing a verbal joke by anonymous authors, the author comes to the conclusion that although both performances meet the convention of old-Polish “tragicomedy”, one can see not only similarities, but also significant differences. In Tragedia żebracza of 1552, the story is based on one plot only (the conflict between beggars and a merchant), while in the text written in the seventeenth century there are many more plots. In both texts, cheerful scenes are intertwined with sad ones (according to the then convention of “tragicomedy”), and the finales of the stories in both works are happy. The comedy is achieved, both in the sixteenth- and seventeenth- century drama, mainly through contrast and surprise (e.g. contrasting characters with a different mentality, ways of thinking and speaking; the contrast between stereotypical images and authentic images of people, inadequacy of declarations in relation to real people, behaviour of some stage characters incompatible with the viewer’s expectations, an example of which is a lively dance of an allegedly sick and lame beggar, etc.) In both texts we observe a type of humour that fits into the old-Polish concept of so-called “satirical comedy”. This means that some characters are consciously and deliberately degraded by ridiculing and highlighting their negative traits. Thus, comic elements do not serve only a ludic function and are not merely “attached” to the story itself to achieve humorous effects, as Julian Lewański, a researcher of old-Polish drama, wrote many years ago. This is because comedy also serves for didactic purposes. More recognizable as a “carnival” drama is the seventeenth-century work. It contains, unlike the sixteenth-century work, a lot of allusions to the carnival time and post-New Year’s party (organised after t New Year’s Day). In the extended stage directions of the Baroque text, the author signalled much more stage means to build comic situations than in the sixteenth-century drama, for example, the author’s information on the facial expressions or, close to pantomime, the actors’ clownish movements are significant. This is related to the appearance, the action and the characteristics of the mask-characters. The masquerade is still very poorly outlined in Renaissance tragicomedy (removing rags and putting on beautiful robes by the beggars can be treated as the masquerade). The Baroque text is dominated by stage characters wearing masks. In the seventeenth-century work we can also observe a desire to diversify the action, increasing the number of comedy heroes and verbal jokes. In these jokes there is a play on words, funny associations, paronymity and ambivalence of meanings. In the Baroque drama the number of means and ways of expressing comedy has also increased, e.g. we observe language parodies absent from the sixteenth-century text, unusual concepts and arguments of stage characters based on absurdity. Moreover, the anonymous seventeenth-century author used literary irony in his text (in the “sophist’s” utterance) as a separate means of provoking comedy. The contrast of those two “carnival” shows originating from two old-Polish literary periods — the Renaissance and the Baroque, is a testimony to the development and transformation of the “tragicomedy” genre.

‘Et dat alapam vita’: A Stage Direction in the Chester 'Noah’s Flood'

This note considers the role of one of the stage directions in the Chester cycle. The direction ‘et dat alapam vita’, found only in British Library MS Harley 2124, records the blow struck by Noah’s wife after her sons force her aboard the ark, and is typically discussed in the context of the misogynistic ‘humour’ found in other dramatic and non-dramatic texts of the period. In this note, I provide an alternative, typological reading of the stage direction.

can you hear me? by Simona Semenič and the question of no-longer-dramatic writing

In the article, the author analyses three plays by Simona Semenič that were published in the book can you hear me? (2017). At first sight, the three pieces appear to be written in Semenič’s now-familiar writing style with no punctuation marks or upper-case initials and no apparent division between dialogues and stage directions. Content-wise, however, the three plays differ significantly from the bulk of the playwright’s opus as they represent autobiographical texts which once again establish the character and more or less distinct dramatic action. The article focuses on two questions: Are these still no-longer-dramatic texts? And, what is the status of representation and performativity in them? By analysing the formal and content properties of the three texts, more precisely, through an analysis of the drama character, the relationship between dialogue and monologue and dramatic action, the author shows that indeed these texts establish recognisable dramatic characters and relatively strong dramatic action. In this, they move away from no-longer- dramatic texts as defined by Gerda Poschmann, even though their legacy is still very much present, e.g., in the fragmented writing style.

The Irruption of the Subjectivity in Jardiel Poncela’s Stage Directions An Analysis of the Phenomenon in Five Author’s Plays (1927-40)

Jardiel Poncela orientó parte de sus esfuerzos literarios hacia la composición de sus acotaciones escénicas, aspecto fundamental de su teatro y dotadas de características tan peculiares que, a menudo, se convierten en piezas decisivas en la interpretación de la escritura dramática del autor. A pesar de que la crítica, en ocasiones, ha subrayado este factor, faltan estudios más pormenorizados sobre la cuestión, lo que es el objetivo de este artículo. Con este propósito, se analizan algunos ejemplos pertenecientes a cinco comedias de Jardiel, en los que destacan mecanismos retóricos, lingüísticos, estilísticos, con los que el autor parece manifestar su presencia en las acotaciones teatrales.

«COMMENTATOR» AS AN ORGANIZER OF A COMMUNICATIVE EVENT IN ASYA VOLOSHINA›S PLAY «GOGOL›S OVERCOAT»

The article is devoted to the problem of a communicative event in the drama. In the study, the text of the play is considered as a space of interaction between the minds of the author, reader and hero. The author of the article proves that one of the conditions for organizing a communicative event is the emergence of a “commentator” - a stage directions subject, and the result is the detection of specific ethical and value positions of the modern playwright and their reader. The work defines the features of the «commentator» which their role as an organizer of a communicative event depends on. The research material is the play by the Petersburg playwright Asya Voloshina «Gogol’s Overcoat» and the performances of the Nahum Orlov Drama Theatre (Chelyabinsk) and the St. Petersburg theater «TSEKH».