Action beat — An action inserted between turns in place of an attribution; called simply a beat in the first edition. The most efficient object in an exchange when it carries a second function, and a tag with extra words when it does not. §5.3.
Adjacency pair — A two-turn sequence in which the first part makes a particular second part conditionally relevant: question/answer, greeting/greeting, offer/acceptance-or-refusal. Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson. Its importance for fiction is that the absence of the expected second part is itself an event. §3.2.
Animator / author / principal — Goffman’s decomposition of the “speaker” role: the one producing the sounds, the one who composed the words, and the one whose position the words express. These can come apart, and a character who separates them is deflecting responsibility. §3.3.
Attribution (tag) — The identification of a speaker: he said, she asked. Its density, its verbs and its replacement by action beats are all craft variables with a documented history. §3.5, §7.1 test 9.
Character zone — Bakhtin’s term for the field around a character in which the narration itself becomes contaminated by that character’s speech habits, so that the boundary between narration and quoted speech becomes porous. §3.4, §9.4.
Conversational implicature — Grice’s term for meaning generated beyond what is said, computed by the hearer on the assumption that the speaker remains cooperative despite a visible breach of a maxim. This chapter’s identification: subtext is conversational implicature. §3.1, §6.2.
Cooperative Principle — Grice’s overarching maxim: make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose of the exchange. Its four attendant maxims are quantity, quality, relation and manner. §3.1.
Dialogue exchange — A passage of spoken interaction between two or more characters, each pursuing a want through what they say, in which the balance of information, power or feeling is measurably different at the end than at the start. §2.1.
Dispreferred response — In conversation analysis, a second pair-part that declines what the first proposed. Systematically marked by delay, hesitation, token agreement, an account and mitigation — which is how skilled novelists write reluctance. §3.2.
Eye-dialect — Respelling that records no actual difference of pronunciation (wuz, sez), and therefore marks a speaker as non-standard without representing anything. §8.9.
Face-work — Goffman’s term for the mutual maintenance of social value in interaction. An exchange turns when one party stops protecting the other’s face. §3.3.
Flouting — Breaching a Gricean maxim openly, in a way the hearer cannot fail to notice, thereby generating an implicature. Distinct from violating, which is covert. §3.1.
Footing — Goffman’s term for a speaker’s alignment to what is said, to the other participants, and to their own role in the utterance; it shifts continuously, often within a turn. §3.3.
Gap-closing move — This chapter’s term for the moment at which text and subtext are allowed to say the same thing. A climactic device, available once or twice in a novel, and spent when used. §6.5.
Heteroglossia — Bakhtin’s term for the stratification of a language into the competing discourses of classes, professions, generations and regions, which the novel stages. The scholarly ground for the requirement that characters sound different. §3.4.
On-the-nose — Dialogue in which text and subtext coincide throughout. Not a prohibition on direct speech but on direct speech everywhere, which spends the gap-closing move before the book has earned it. §8.3.
Participation framework — Goffman’s account of the full set of parties to an utterance: ratified participants (addressed and unaddressed) and bystanders (overhearers and eavesdroppers). The theoretical basis of the silence domain. §3.3, §4.6.
Phatic communion — Malinowski’s term for talk whose function is the maintenance of the channel and the relationship rather than the transfer of content. Socially essential, narratively inert. §2.3.
Polyphony — Bakhtin’s term for a novel in which characters’ ideological positions retain genuine independence and are not resolved by the author’s evaluative position. The requirement behind the staged dialectic. §3.4, §4.4.
Preference organisation — The asymmetry between the two possible second parts of an adjacency pair: acceptances come fast and bare, refusals come marked. §3.2.
Relational domain — The fifth domain of purpose, proposed in Chapter 1 (The Purposes of a Scene) and adopted here: the negotiation of standing, permission, intimacy and obligation between speakers. §4.3.
Repair — The correction of trouble in talk, with a strong structural preference for self-correction. Other-correction is rare in life and therefore aggressive on the page. §3.2.
Silence domain — This chapter’s proposed sixth domain: what is not said, who does not speak, and who is excluded from the exchange. §4.6.
Subtext — The want, fear or withheld fact driving a line, legible to the reader through context, contradiction or omission but rarely stated by the speaker. §6.1.
Text (in the two-channel sense) — The literal content of a line: the words a court reporter would transcribe. §6.1.
Turn — One speaker’s contribution, bounded by the transitions on either side; the unit of conversation analysis and the smallest constituent of an exchange. §2.2, §3.2.
Value shift — McKee’s formulation, introduced in Chapter 1 (The Purposes of a Scene): the movement of a charged value from one pole towards its opposite, which a unit worth keeping must produce. §1.3, §2.1.
Vocative — A name or title used to address someone. Rare and marked in real speech; therefore conspicuous in fiction when used on every turn. §8.7.