Repetition as a means of verbal and psychological violence in interrogation scenes from contemporary drama

Repetition is a common linguistic element in literary as well as non-literary discourse. In A Dictionary of Stylistics, Katie Wales draws attention to the two sets of effects it can produce in everyday use: it can be an unwanted redundancy as well as a “powerful resource of interpersonal involvement and rapport” (2014, 366). While the former is not characteristic of quality literature, the latter can be a potent stylistic tool for achieving a range of effects. Paul Simpson (2004, 50) refers to repetition as one of the main principles in forming textual patterns (e.g., foregrounding), thus bringing certain features of the text to the front of the reader’s or – in the case of staged drama – viewer’s attention. Similarly, Michael Burke (2014, 25-28) sees repetition as one of the significant features in stylistics, next to parallelism and deviation, but suggests that the concepts concerning its function need to be further developed and researched. John Cuddon credits repetition in literature with a structural function, denoting it an “essential unifying element in nearly all poetry and much prose” (1999, 742), while understanding it in broad terms: as repetition of words, phrases, stanzas or longer excerpts, even sounds and other stylistic or linguistic phenomena. Edward Quinn (2006, 359-60) extends this definition to the employment of repeated images with an impact on the imagery of the work, as well as to visual context, by acknowledging repetition as a technique in film. This makes repetition applicable to all absolute genres, in Szondi’s (2000, 30-31) sense, and most particularly to drama. An extensive overview of research about repetition in spoken conversation was provided by Deborah Tannen (2007). Several authors she mentions (e.g., Schegloff, 1997; Rieger, 2003; Linell, 1982; Svennevig, 2004, and others, cit. in Tannen (15-16)) as well as Tannen herself emphasize the importance of considering the sound aspect – particularly intonation – in the analysis of repetition patterns: “the very notion that the repetition of words spoken in conversation is ‘exact’ repetition holds only if we think of words as they would appear in a dictionary, stripped of their sound” (2007, 16). This suggests that the semantic potential of voice quality, i.e., volume, intonation, stress and other phonetic aspects, is too often ignored. These findings are particularly