Constructing characters multimodally: a focus on pragmatics of film dialogue

Abstract

Ізотова Н. П. доктор філологічних наук, доцент, професор кафедри англійської філології і філософії мови Київський національний лінгвістичний університет м. Київ, УкраїнаTraditionally, pragmatics is viewed as "the study of all aspects of linguistic behaviour" [1, p. v]. Besides, it covers semiotic behaviours in all their multimodality [2, p. 96]. Pragmatics concerned with the production and consumption of literary texts is termed as literary pragmatics [3, p. 511]. It primarily focuses on "what readers infer" from the language and behaviours, and the way in which those will "predetermine to a certain degree" interpretation [2, p. 96].This paper sets out to specify pragmatic effects brough about by the multimodal presentation of characters in cinematic discourse. In cognitive narratology, characters are defined as "multimodal (semiotic) constructs in the service of a narrative aimed at a target audience, and therefore exist in the minds of that audience as cognitive constructs [4, p. 2022]. This research offers a landscape modal [5] for construing characters in film discourse. Specifically, a film character is viewed as a cognitive construct which incorporates three landscapesemotional, behavioural (actional), and cognitive, each of them is represented multimodally.Bednarek distinguisges two kinds of multimodality in TV discoursemultimodality in character presentation and multimodality in the film in general. The former is about various semiotic dimensions of character performance, i. e. gestures, gaze, facial expression, etc.; whereas the latter refers to "the meaning potential of the moving image itself" [6, p. 20] and includes such aspects as camera, editing, lightning, and sound.Thus, the multimodal analysis of characters in film encompasses three procedures: 1) a linguostylistic analysis of film dialogue in terms of key