The Use of Referentiality in Examining Selected Stage Directions in Sophocles' “Oedipus the King”

Abstract

‘Oedipus the King’ is an ancient tragic play that tells the story of King Oedipus of Thebes, who lived about a period before the proceedings of the Trojan War. Gradually, this King came to the realization that he had accidentally slaughtered Laius, his father, and married Jocasta, his biological mother. Fate, conflict, and free will (i.e. the inexorableness of oracular prophecies) are the main themes of the text. This paper examines selected stage directions in Oedipus the King, a text written by Sophocles. A purposive sample technique was used in selecting these stage directions. In linguistics, language, and literary criticism, 'referentiality' is usually deployed to describe the connotational and denotational sense of an entity to explicate the association between language and extralinguistic object. So, content analysis design, through referentiality, was deployed in critiquing and exhuming the hidden meanings of the selected stage directions. Thus, the use of the referentiality model coupled with definiteness and indefiniteness facilitated the unearthing of familiarity, identifiability, and uniqueness from the selected extracts. The paper is structured in four thematic areas: the introduction, methods, analysis and discussion, and conclusion.