ABSTRACT
Even though drama has long been part of literature, it did not receive as much attention from stylisticians as the other literary genres, such as poetry and fiction. It was not until the late 1980s and early 1990s that drama stylistics, that is, the stylistic study of dramatic text, finally established itself as an indispensable component of the study of style.
My thesis attempts to make a tentative study on how stage directions interact with dialogues in drama in expressing the intended meaning, thus helping the readers understand the meaning more thoroughly. In explaining the relation between stage directions and dialogues in drama, some ideas originated from multimodal discourse analysis, namely the three modes for the photographic mode to signal the point of view of a text proposed by Qu Weiguo[12] , are borrowed. It is hoped that the preliminary study will be helpful for Chinese academia to conduct further researches in this respect.
The main contents fall into four parts: 1.literature review of drama stylistics; 2. relations between stage directions and dialogues in drama; 3.the demonstration analysis on examples from Death of a Salesman；4. the conclusion, limitations of the present thesis and direction for further studies.
Keywords：stage direction; dialogue in drama; relation
Contents
1.Introduction 1
2. Literature Review 3
2.1 Studies of Dialogue in Drama 3
2.2 Studies of Stage Directions in Drama 4
2.3 Studies of Dialogue and Stage Directions in Drama 4
2.4 Relations Between the Linguistic and Photographic Modes 5
2.5 Definition of a Turn and Classification of Stage Directions 6
3. Relationship Between Stage Directions and Dialogue in Drama 7
3.1 Dramatization 7
3.2 Crossfire 8
3.3 Insinuation 9
4. Demonstration Analysis on Examples from Death of a Salesman 12
4.1 Introduction to Death of a Salesman 12
4.2 Demonstration Analysis 12
5. Conclusion 18
Acknowledgements 19
References 20
