pentadic

Pentadic refers to the pentad, a five-part analytical framework used in Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic theory to study human action and rhetoric. The pentad invites analysts to reconstruct motives by organizing a situation around five interrelated terms, treating motive as the central concern of interpretation.

The five terms are act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. The act denotes what was done. The scene sets the context, including time, place, and circumstances. The agent identifies who performed the act. The agency refers to the means or instruments used. The purpose explains why the act was done or what the actor seeks to achieve.

In practice, pentadic analysis examines how texts or actions foreground or de-emphasize different elements and how the relationships among terms illuminate underlying motives. Analysts often consider ratios between pairs of terms (for example, agent–act, act–scene, scene–agent, agency–purpose, and purpose–scene) to reveal tensions, rationalizations, or dominant causal logics within rhetoric or social action.

Origins and use: the framework was introduced by Kenneth Burke in his work on dramatism, most notably A Grammar of Motives (1945). Since then, pentadic analysis has been applied across literary criticism, rhetoric, communications studies, anthropology, and related fields to interpret speeches, narratives, and performances by examining how motives are constructed through the interplay of act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose.

Example applications might analyze a political speech, a literary scene, or a organizational decision, asking how the speaker positions the act within a particular scene, attributes it to certain agents, relies on specific agency, and promotes a chosen purpose. The framework is interpretive and context-dependent, not a definitive account of events.