Interactional Approach to Cinematic Discourse

“Written in an engaging and lucid style, the book offers an insightful, up-to-date analysis of scripted conversation in cinematic discourse. The author convincingly shows how fictional figures construct the narrative, paying attention to embodied nuances of the characters’ on-screen interactions. The book will be much appreciated by all scholars and students working in the socio-interactional paradigm and will also be welcome by those with an interest in stylistics, conversation analysis and multimodal studies”. - Jan Chovanec, Professor of English Linguistics, Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic This book analyses and describes a segment of Woody Allen’s cinematic discourse, focusing specifically on the performed (or diegetic) interactions between actors in various roles in some of his films. It is a case study of Woody Allen's cinematic discourse, encompassing the on-screen, performed interaction in the films at the level of the story-world. The analysis focuses on speech (film dialogues), in both its verbal and prosodic forms, as well as non-verbal types of interaction including gaze and gesture, taking a social interactional approach and using multimodal conversation analysis as a theoretical framework and analytical tool. The 'texts' under study are segments from five films by Woody Allen, and the analysed interactions take place between male and female interactants, which allows further examination of on-screen interactions via a gender lens. The book aims to bridge the gap between the disciplines of applied linguistics and cinema studies and offer linguistic insights into performed interactions from a multimodal point of view. It will be equally relevant to linguists who are interested in how verbal and non-verbal language is used in cinematic discourse, as well as to film workers, especially actors, directors and screenwriters. Neda Chepinchikj is a linguist working at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. She holds a PhD in applied linguistics, educational linguistics and screen and media culture from the University of Melbourne. This is her first book, which is based on her PhD thesis.