The Functional Architecture of Play Texts: Harry Potter and the Stage Directions
Creators: name: Quammie-Wallen, Patrice
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Arts and Humanities
subject: drama theory
subject: functional stylistics
subject: Harry Potter
subject: stage directions

description: This research intends to address the overlap of the gaps of 1/ SFL description of play texts and 2/ analysis of the stage directions of play texts, by offering a functional exploration of stage directions using the SFL theoretical framework. The goal is to, first of all, understand the functional and meaning making purpose of stage directions. The second aim is to capture the play text as a more unified entity. This involves capturing the stage directions' lexico-grammatical and logico-semantic (rhetorical -relational) realisations, moving upward to the rhetorical-relational realisations of an entire play in order to reveal the interplay among its chief elements of dialogue, monologue and stage directions. According to Melrose, SFL’s three metafunctions- textual, ideational, and interpersonal, and their grounding in the social- offers a more semiotically robust framework for accounting for the drama text as practice (Melrose, 1985, 1993). Such SFL analysis will also describe the play as register. Matthiessen (2015) has posited a registerial cartography in systemic functional linguistics, a mapping of the eight different types of registers existing in language, one of which is the recreating register, to which the play text belongs, (under dramatization). In this ongoing project, exploration of the recreating register- that is, the register of narration and drama - is needed as movement is made forward in outfitting the theory. Therefore, this research can serve to contribute to the description of dramatization in the recreating register by mapping the metafunctions (ideational, interpersonal, textual) and rhetorical structure of an instantiation of a play text. This is quite apart from the already potentially significant contribution to the functional description of English through description of an under- researched subsystem in its repertoire. The SFL analysis of a play text offers understanding of the semantic choices made in a language within a social context and the resulting meaning. The instantiation of the play text to undergo these analyses is J.K Rowling, John Tiffany and Jack Thorne’s new offering of "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" (otherwise known as Harry Potter the Play -HPTP) (2017), in its source language -English. To better illuminate results the play will be compared along similar semantic lines with the results of another English play “Lady Audley’s Secret” (Hazlewood, 1889) as well as along thematic lines with a cross section of the stage directions in the Japanese translation of HPTP - ハリー・ポッターと呪いの子 (Thorne, Tiffany, &amp; Rowling, 2018). With the textual component of language being the one that actually creates text and crafts language to be “relevant to its environment” (Michael Halliday, 1977/2002, p. 29), a general language contrast can further understand the stage direction text in English. [UPDATE] - Japanese comparison omitted between confirmation report submission (Dec 28, 2018) and presentation (Jan 9, 2019), as French had been 3 months prior. The Peacock Model (1984), found Jan 6, 2019, was included as the working conceptual model for the goals of the research.