The language of Ford's The Broken Heart, unlike that of his other plays, mainly explains the inevitable operation of the processes that the play dramatizes, delineating cause and effect in feelings and actions. The indicative names signify what their bearers have become within the chain of causality. The beginning of the play is heavily explanatory and characters continue throughout to explain what they and others do and have become. Many of these speeches are imprecise: groping, periphrastic, ambiguous syntactically, and metaphorically unstable. The words, furthermore, describe experience rather than become a part of it. Short, direct statements bring the longer passages to rest, the two styles forming a rhythmical unit yet balancing each other and providing a sense of things unsaid. Especially distinctive are verb forms that concretize interaction among abstract nouns to explain how and why things happen. Some are reiterated as key words indicative of the pattern of the whole. The language of ceremonies, violated and reshaped into antithetical ceremonies, particularly those of propitiation and sacrifice, gives form and significance to the pattern of causation and intensifies as the play moves to its conclusion. Through his language, Ford controls any tendency to melodrama and harmonizes surprise with inevitability, narrowness with range, and explicitness with implication.