Perlocutionary Goals and Rhetorical Organization in Dialogues: Analysis of a Passage from Arthur Schnitzler’s Novel Fräulein Else

In a dialogue speakers pursue ‘perlocutionary goals’ and organize their utterances in such a rhetorical way as to attain them. We analyse such perlocutionary goals and rhetorical organizations in a ‘special’ dialogue, i.e. a selected passage from Arthur Schnitzler’s novel Fräulein Else: while reading a letter received from her mother, Else builds up, at a space-time distance, a ‘fictional dialogue’ with her. We analyze how Else’s mother rhetorically organizes the letter in order to convince her daughter, how Else reacts to the letter in her own ‘inner world’, how Else verbally reacts to the letter and what decision she takes. In our analysis we also focus on linguistic indexes of Duty, Knowledge, Possibility, Value.