Language
The language style is of course colloquial. Sentences are generally very short, even in the occasional more lengthy monologues. It jumps between soft and concerned, creating pauses and carefully placed verbal cues in the lines, to rather witty and harsh, with perfectly timed responses so as to create a quick volley of argument between the characters. This shift is especially noticeable as the play wears on, as situations intensify and emotions rise. It is "brilliantly paced both in the writing and in Eyre's moving, funny, and richly rewarding production."
One could also assess various strategies of the actual sound of the words – consonants versus vowels, dissonance and alliteration – but these components do not seem to play a large part in the overall sense of the play. It is much more about timing and content of the dialogue rather than the literal sound. Each character uses rather similar effects so that there is no noticeable variation in the sound of the speech in terms of individual use of language.
Read more about this topic: Amy's View
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of this faculty as a ‘language acquisition device,’ an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“Strange goings on! Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece of toast. We are too familiar with the language of action to notice at first an anomaly: the ‘it’ of ‘Jones did it slowly, deliberately,...’ seems to refer to some entity, presumably an action, that is then characterized in a number of ways.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)