Stranger than Fiction? A Few Methodological Notes on Linguistic Research in Film Discourse

Abstract

This theoretical essay addresses a number of methodological problems pertinent to linguistic research on film discourse. First of all, attention is paid to the interdependence between contemporary film discourse and everyday language, with a view to dispersing doubts about the former's legitimacy in language studies. Also, the discussion captures the interface between a character's identity portrayal and the target audience's socio-cultural background and expectations. Another objective is to elaborate a model of film discourse's twofold layering, viz. the fictional layer and the film crew's layer; and two communicative levels, namely the characters' level and the viewer's level, on which meanings are communicated and inferred by the viewer, who is conceptualised as the recipient. Additionally, the notion of recipient design will be endorsed in order to demonstrate that meanings are purposefully communicated to, and thus gleaned by, the viewer. Several postulates are propounded concerning the viewer's understanding and appreciation of film discourse.

Humorous phenomena in dramatic discourse

“…Little support can be given to Gibbs et al's (1995) and Gibbs's (2011) claim that dramatic irony is unintentional, as it is always the result of the scriptwriter's plan (Simpson 2011). This brings the discussion to the problem of two levels of communication and the fact that the interactants are not actually the authors of the interactions, which are the film crew's product (Dynel 2011b(Dynel , 2011c. Looking at the character's level alone, one may indeed observe that characters do not mean dramatic irony to happen.…”

“…In other words, the humour must sound plausible in the context of the characters' portrayal and interactions, reminiscent of real world people (even if not stereotypical, but showing idiosyncrasies) and their interactions. However, this does not mean that all humour in fictional talk must necessarily operate in real-life discourse according to the same patterns, given the intrinsic workings of films, with which recipients are familiar and which they take for granted (see Dynel 2011aDynel , 2011bDynel , 2011c.…”

The suitability of film for modelling the pragmatics of interaction: Exploring authenticity

“…Conversely, other researchers have argued that the ways in which film dialogue diverges from spontaneous speech are essentially superficial, and characterised by the same linguistic features (Dynel, 2011;Forchini, 2012;Martínez Flor, 2007); similar arguments have been made for both the television series Friends (Quaglio, 2009) and internet television (Lin, 2014). Among such studies, the monographs by Forchini (2012) and Quaglio (2009) stand apart as being particularly detailed and indepth, both adopting the multidimensional discourse-grammatical approach of Douglas Biber.…”

The language of Irish films

“…(), Hodson (), Queen () and Walshe (), with several comparing performed language in film and television with language from naturally‐occurring speech. This performed language, also known as ‘telecinematic discourse’ (Piazza, Bednarek & Rossi ), ‘filmspeak’ (Alvarez‐Pereyre : 51) and ‘film discourse (or film talk)’ (Dynel : 41) has received less scholarly attention perhaps because it is deemed to be less authentic than unscripted speech, which more closely resembles the real language of everyday life. Indeed, reviewing the merits of performed language for linguistic research, Alvarez‐Pereyre () notes some ways in which this speech differs from spontaneous conversation.…”