Multimodal instantiation of negative emotions in English cinematic discourse

Abstract

The article focuses on revealing the multimodal instantiation of anger, fear, sadness, and disgust in English cinematic discourse and determining the mechanisms of their construction by verbal, nonverbal, and cinematographic semiotic resources. The cognitive-pragmatic linguosemiotic approach enables to identify cognitive and communicative characteristics of negative emotions, and focuses on the process of emotive meaning-making as a social practice. Emotions in cinematic discourse undergo primary (in the screenplay) and secondary semiosis (in the film diegetic space through multimodal realization). The communicative properties of film emotions are based on conceptual features that are entrenched in the semantic space structured by a lexical-semantic field with a dominant ‒ the name of the concept. The tokens of a certain field serve as indicators of negative emotions in the screenplay and enable to objectively define the film emotion. The specific multisemiotic nature of cinematic discourse emphasizes the characteristics of the concept to be marked by heterogeneous signs and determines verbal, nonverbal, and cinematographic profiles of the emotion. Semiotic means of the corresponding profiles form combinations of emotive meaning instantiation. Each negative emotion is realized by specific models of heterogeneous semiotic resources interaction according to static and dynamic criteria. The former identifies the models by the parameters of quantity (two-/three-componental), quality (convergent/ divergent), and prominence (parity/non-parity). The latter determines synchronous and consequent models.