Inferring relationships from dialogue in Marsha Norman’s "‘night, Mother"

<ns3:p>The paper is an attempt at demonstrating and describing relationships between two characters of a dramatic text, Jessie and Mama from Marsha Norman’s play ‘night, Mother. This can only be done based on textual cues, that is, such uses of the language by the characters that allows the reader to infer relations between them. Pragmatic frameworks of face and (im)politeness as well as complementary discourse-analytic framework of turn-taking are used to show how, in light of the broad, dynamic context of interaction, the two women ‘do friendship’ and how they ‘do conflict’.</ns3:p>