Psyholinguistic image of Elsa (in the film Frozen)

Abstract

The article considers the peculiarities of creating a psycholinguistic image of a film character belonging to “the Mystic” psychological archetype. The work contributes to the study of a comprehensive system of psycholinguistic images of the mass culture English-language films in XXI century. The paper regards the fantasy film by C. Buck and J. Lee “Frozen” (2013). Dialogic speech of the characters is a universal means to reveal the psychological type of a character. According to the classification of psychological archetypes by V. Schmidt (2007), the queen Elsa belongs to “the Mystic” archetype, with the following distinguishing features. She feels a connection with something supernatural, with something greater than herself. The feature is revealed by metaphors and lexico-semantic groups POWER and STORM to depict Elsa’s magical abilities to create snow and ice. She finds solace in loneliness, which is demonstrated by the lexico-semantic group ISOLATION. She is able to resist when her opinion is manipulated, which we see in the confrontational style of communication with the antagonist Prince Hans. Neither the idea of marriage nor material possessions interest her. Elsa’s family is her sister Anna, which is depicted by frequent appellatives “Anna”, pronouns of the second person singular to define Anna and the lexico-semantic group CARE. She tries to keep the peace in the relationship at any cost, thus frequenting the token “please” and requesting speech acts in her speech and using the verbal tactics to avoid conflict. She tries to overcome her fears but sometimes she fails, which is disclosed by exclamatory sentences in combination with the tokens of the group ANXIETY to express fear, sorrow and anxiety. Frequent use of the first-person singular pronoun demonstrates her concentration on herself, her feelings and emotions. She needs a place to escape from reality, which is depicted by metaphors and tokens of the group ESCAPE. She is rarely in a hurry, thus her shorter than Anna’s sentences and lower speech rate. Others see her as either weird or dangerous, bringing Elsa to hide her abilities, which is displayed by the lexico-semantic group CONCEAL.