Monologue, Soliloquy, Sonnets, and Theming in Linguistics
Monologue and Soliloquy
Monologue and soliloquy have similar meanings and, in most cases, can be used interchangeably. The word ‘monologue’ has more senses. It may have the same meaning as a soliloquy. It can be applied to an extended speech uttered by a single speaker who attempts to have the monopoly or exclusive rights or control of a conversation. In a third sense, a monologue is a form of dramatic entertainment, that is, a composition or a poem, in which there is only a single speaker: a comedian’s monologue when there is a second person who is addressed. In narrative discourse, the term interior monologue is used to refer to the endless mental activity of characters, consisting of the flow of visual, auditory, olfactory, physical, or even subliminal impressions that impact or affect their consciousness, together with their line of rational thoughts, feelings, and volitions.
The English Sonnet
The English sonnet is composed of three quatrains, each having an independent rhyme scheme, and is ended with a rhymed couplet. The rhyme scheme of the English sonnet is abab cdcd efef gg. The typical Elizabethan use of the sonnet was in a sequence of love poems in the manner of Petrarch. Although each sonnet was an independent poem, partly conventional in content and partly self-revelatory, the sequence had the added interest of providing something of a narrative development.
The Spenserian Sonnet
The Spenserian sonnet follows the English quatrain and couplet pattern but resembles the Italian in using a linked rhyme scheme: abab bcbc cdcd ee. Elizabethan sonnet sequences were generally in some kind of narrative order. Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, moreover, and Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti each tells a reasonably well-authenticated story. Shakespeare’s sonnets, however, do not give the impression of an ordered sequence as it exists in Sidney, Spenser, and others.
Thematization in Linguistics
In linguistics, ‘theme’ has several meanings. One of them is the starting unit of a statement. A theme has three traits:
- (a) The emphasis of an informative piece of a statement over others.
- (b) The acceptance that this information is shared by the interlocutors.
- (c) The forced syntactic ordering of the rest of the lexical units regarding grammatical accidents, regime, etc., in accordance with the starting unit.
Thematization is a syntactic process by which a constituent that does not normally assume that role in the most frequent or expected sentence order, technically called ‘unmarked’ order, becomes the theme, with the consequences mentioned above.
Theming, Passivization, and Nominalization
Theming is a syntactic process whereby a constituent becomes the theme. Passivization is an organizational process that responds to the loss of newsworthiness by the agent of the action and is a resource used to belittle the agent. The passive voice serves to redirect the story of an event and allows omitting some of the information that was in the active sentence, as used in headlines. In scientific assertions, there is also a tendency to delete the agent of action or hide their identity to give greater visibility to the effect or result of the action, which is, of course, more important than the agent itself.
Nominalization is a substantive transformation that reduces a whole sentence. It is also a current resource in scientific and technical texts. Its purpose is to present, using a name, the whole process that has been described previously by a long verbal predicate, such as automation, integration, differentiation, etc. Nominalization is full of intentionality since its purpose is to hide the identity of the author of the action and, therefore, avoid or dilute their responsibility.