Abstract
Documentaries, like other genres, are being increasingly used by wildlife conservationists for creating awareness and influencing viewers to become active backers of wildlife protection. While there have been analyses of documentaries that focus on cinematic techniques, stylistic analyses of the language used in them have been limited. This paper analyses the prologue to the documentary, “The journey from brutal poacher to delicate pastry chef”, and the visual monologue narrative, “The Pastry Chef”, to show how the scriptwriter uses language as rhetoric to raise social consciousness amongst its audience. The paper adopts the stylistic pluralism approach which blends literary criticism, linguistic analysis and stylistic description. Leech and Short’s (2007) broad framework of linguistic and stylistic categories (i.e. lexical items, grammatical features, figures of speech and other rhetoric features and cohesiveness) is used to show how the scriptwriter creates awareness of wildlife conservation and positions people as active backers of wildlife protection. It argues that linguistic choices – such as lexical items, grammatical features and cohesive devices – and rhetoric are critical features of documentary design. Keywords: documentary; rhetoric; stylistics; wildlife conservation
Highlights
Documentaries, like other genres – such as poetry, fiction and drama – use language in specific ways to convey particular messages, elicit emotional responses from audiences and persuade them to act in ways the scriptwriter desires
The foregoing stylistic analysis of the prologue, “From Brutal Poacher to Delicate Pastry Chef” and the visual narrative, “The Pastry Chef” support Nørgaard’s et al (2010) notion that frameworks of literary analysis can be used for both print and moving images
In applying Leech and Short’s (2007) framework of literary analysis to both the print text and documentary, what emerges is that not all stylistic categories of the framework are necessarily evident in texts chosen for analysis, nor are they discrete categories
Summary
Documentaries, like other genres – such as poetry, fiction and drama – use language in specific ways to convey particular messages, elicit emotional responses from audiences and persuade them to act in ways the scriptwriter desires. 124) refers to writers’ specific linguistic choices to enable distinguishing between elements of meaning according to particular modes of expression This approach, which focuses on the relationship between form and content, challenges the notion that the function of language is to communicate merely ideas or thoughts; language has a variety of functions which include the emotive, referential, connotative, poetic, persuasive and social. Numerous authors (e.g. Zhengh 2014, Puspita 2014, Kiminori 2015) have analysed various literary texts using this framework by focusing on how language functions in literary contexts; their studies show yields of rich data In her analysis of Martin Luther King’s speech, “I have a Dream”, Zengh (2014) shows how the orator “enlivens” his speech by skilful use of lexicon (such as pronouns and contractions), syntactic features (such as repetition and parallelism) and figurative language (such as simile, metaphor and paradox) to achieve his purpose of persuading his audience to fight for equality of Blacks. The degree to which the perceiver sympathises (i.e. feeling for another person) or empathises (i.e. feeling with another person) can be motivated by conflict situations (Lutsenko, 2018)
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