المستخلص: |
The principal objective of the paper is to investigate the role of conjunctions in five of Macbeth's soliloquies. \ Since the soliloquies are rhetorical debates about Macbeth’s thoughts and emotions, conjunctions function as an effective means of carrying forth and developing the arguments of the soliloquies to their logical conclusions. \ Linguistically, conjunctions belong to the category of grammatical cohesion that’s why conjunctions are found to play a significant part in the cohesive structure of the soliloquies \ The paper has found out that in all the soliloquies conjunctions are foregrounded whether they are intersentential, operating across sentences (punctuation units) or intrasentential occurring between the clausal elements of a single sentence. \ Moreover, many conjunctions in the soliloquies are seen to occur in successive or adjacent structures . Furthermore, some conjunctions are foregrounded at the beginning of the poetic line (orthographically) which implies their occurrence initially in their respective tone units. \ The most recurrent conjunctions in the soliloquies are the additive conjunction “and", the alternative conjunction “or” and the adversative conjunction “but”. \ It's found out that since Macbeth is a man of action rather than a man of thought, the additive conjunction “and” is combined syntactically or semantically with other conjunctions to expand ideas, give explanations, provide alternatives, set contrasts, state reasons, draw conclusions and help reach fatal decisions that have led Macbeth to commit crimes, seize power and fall at the end due to a hell of his own making. \ Ultimately, it can be said that the soliloquy as a speech act constitutes part and parcel of a Shakespearean tragedy as illustrated in Macbeth. A subsequent collection of papers is required to identify the distinctive linguistic characteristics of the soliloquies of Shakespeare’s other plays.
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