电影语境中的话语理解

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ABSTRACT

A film can be considered good not only because of its excellent, exquisite and

magnificent pictures, but also because of the conversations between the characters.

Sometimes, the lines can always be remembered and they become classical. The

conversation is the core of a film and excellent lines of actors and actresses are

indispensable to a good film. According to our experience, we know that sometimes

the lines are easy to understand, but sometimes it needs our effort to figure out the

meaning of it. As an ordinary audience, he/she is unconscious of this process and just

thinks this ability as inborn. This thesis focuses on analysing film conversations

appearing with the help of pragmatic principles, especially the context theory. By

analysing what the conversations imply in a film and how the meanings can be worked

out, it is meant to instruct people how they can understand a conversation effectively

and appropriately.

I divide the film context into two general parts: scene (the scenes and scenarios

happening in the film itself) and viewer’s knowledge (the knowledge that the audience

is equipped with). We can call the scenes in a film the foreground knowledge or

background knowledge. They play an extremely important role in giving the audience

some clues and hints about certain plot. It also includes the knowledge of the time

when the film takes place. Film is a different art form and it can retrospect what has

happened before by using the filming techniques. Film is a combination of vision and

audition, if you do not watch the pictures and just listen to the conversation, you will

lose much information and therefore lots of misunderstandings will arise. The viewer

knowledge includes three sub-groups: the viewer’s encyclopaedic knowledge; the

viewer’s knowledge of different cultures and their conventions and their synthesizing

and observing ability.

Speech act theory concentrates on the illocutionary force of an utterance and it

cannot explain all of the language phenomena. Indirect speech act may sound

reasonable, but sometimes it doesn’t work either. Therefore, cooperative principle and

other pragmatic principles are on the stage to explore the conversational implicature,

which can help a lot in understanding conversations in the film.

Key words: Cinematographic language, Context, Conversational

implicature, Speech Act Theory, Cooperative Principle

摘要

好电影不仅仅有精美，壮丽的画面，还要有耐人寻味的对白。这些对白可以

让人牢记于心。对白是电影的灵魂，是电影不可缺少的一部分。根据经验，有些

对白很明白易懂，而有些则需要努力地推断其含义。作为普通观众，他们并没有

意识到这一过程，只是把这一能力当作天生的。本篇论文侧重用语用学的理论分

析电影对白，特别是语境理论。通过分析怎么挖掘对话中隐含的意义而指导人们

更好地理解电影。

电影语境包括场景（电影情节）和观众知识。电影中的场景有前景和背景，

他们对观众准确地理解电影起了很重要的作用。对电影背景知识（年代，特定的

历史背景，人们的精神状态）的了解，对人物性格，会话发生的时间，地点以及

当时的情景或之前发生的小事件的了解等等有助于理解电影。电影是一种不同的

娱乐方式，运用一些摄影技术可以让我们看到已经发生的情节。电影是听觉和视

觉的结合，如果不看画面，会产生很多曲解或错解。观众知识包括观众的常识，

观众对不同文化习俗的了解以及他们的综合理解能力。

言语行为理论侧重分析一句话的言外形为，但是它不能解释所有的语言现象。

间接言语行为可以分析人们的间接话语，但是如果结合合作原则，礼貌原则和关

联理论就可以更好地理解会话含义，更好地理解电影。

关键词：电影语言，语境，会话含义, 言语行为理论，合作原则

CONTENTS

ABSTRACT

摘要

Chapter One Introduction ..............................................................................................1

§1.1 Utterance .......................................................................................................... 2

§1.2 Conversational Implicature ..............................................................................2

§1.3 Context ............................................................................................................. 3

§1.4 Task of This Article ..........................................................................................4

Chapter Two Utterance Understanding in Film Context ........................................... 6

§2.1 Cinematographic Language ............................................................................. 7

§2.1.1 Introduction to Cinematographic Language .......................................... 7

§2.1.2 Cinematographic Language and Natural Language ...............................8

§2.1.3 Components of Cinematographic Language ..........................................9

§2.1.4 Features of Film Utterances ................................................................. 11

§2.2 Utterance Understanding in Film Context ..................................................... 12

§2.2.1 Scenes and Scenarios in the Film .........................................................15

§2.2.2 Viewer’s Knowledge ............................................................................19

§2.2.2.1 Viewer’s Encyclopaedic Knowledge ................................................ 20

§2.2.2.2 Viewer’s Knowledge of Different Cultural Conventions and

Principles ...........................................................................................................23

§2.2.2.3 Viewer’s Synthesizing Ability in Understanding Film Utterance .... 26

Chapter Three Speech Act Theory and Indirect Speech Act in Understanding

Film Utterances ............................................................................................................. 29

§3.1 Introduction to Speech Act Theory ................................................................ 29

§3.2 Speech Act Theory in Understanding Film Utterance ................................... 31

§3.3 Indirect Speech Act ........................................................................................ 33

Chapter Four Understanding Conversational Implicature of Film Utterances .. 37

§4.1 Introduction to Conversational Implicature ................................................... 37

§4.2 Cooperative Principle in Understanding Film Utterances ............................. 39

§4.2.1 Introduction to Cooperative Principle ..................................................39

§4.2.2 Cooperative Principle in Understanding Film Utterances ................... 41

§4.3 Politeness Principle and Relevance Theory as Complements to CP in Film

Utterance Understanding ......................................................................................... 46

§4.3.1 Politeness Principle in Understanding Film Conversations .................47

§4.3.2 Relevance Theory in Understanding Film Conversations ................... 49

Chapter Five Conclusion .............................................................................................. 53

Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 56

在读期间公开发表的论文 ............................................................................................ 58

Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................... 59

Chapter One Introduction

Film, as a popular art, has been affecting people’s life for generations since that

moment on December 28th, 1895 when the Lumiere brothers started theater projection,

and started as well, the over-a-century-long history of films. Films, as a mass medium

with the broadest coverage, play multi-communicative functions such as cross-lingual,

cross-cultural and cross-social communication.

Film, just like TV plays or novels, is a kind of art for entertainment. The film should

be viewed and thought about by people. We call them audience which includes all

kinds of persons with different educational, cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Maybe

they are students, workers, government employees or the pedestrians on the street.

Despite all these differences, a successful film can be understood anyway. Take Gone

with the Wind for an example. It is a very successful movie based on its famous novel.

Anyone who has seen this film must have the deepest impression of Scarlett, who is an

optimistic woman with strong perseverance. Maybe you have already forgotten most of

the details in this film, but the utterance by Scarlett at the end of the film is still

haunting in your mind and sometimes it will still inspire you when you are frustrated

or upset. Let’s recall this classical utterance together:

Scarlett: Tara! Home. I'll go home. And I'll think of some way to get him back. After

all, tomorrow is another day!

How can such an ordinary utterance give us such deep impression? There are also

circumstances that we cannot figure out the exact meanings of a conversation just from

the literal meaning of the utterance. For example:

Susan: I could be her.

Young Man: 'Her'.

What does ‘her’ mean in this conversation? How can we understand it clearly and

without ambiguity?

That will be the general focus in this thesis and I will apply some pragmatic theories

to analyse those intricate conversations in the film. In this chapter, I’d like to introduce

some concepts that relate to the conversation understanding.

Utterance Understanding in Film Context

§1.1 Utterance

First, the utterance can be considered as a form of act or activity: a speech act.

Whereas grammar deals with abstract static entities such as sentences (in syntax) and

propositions (in semantics), pragmatics deals with verbal acts or performances which

take place in particular situation, in time. Second, the utterance can be as a product of a

verbal act. There is another sense in which the word ‘utterance’ can be used in

pragmatics: it can refer to the product of a verbal act, rather than to the verbal act itself.

For instance, the words Would you please be quiet?, spoken with a polite rising

intonation, might be described as a sentence, or as a question, or as a request. However,

it is convenient to reserve terms like sentence and question for grammatical entities

derived from the language system, and to reserve the term utterance for instances of

such entities, identified by their use in a particular situation. Hence an utterance may

be a sentence-instance, or sentence-token; but strictly speaking, it cannot be a sentence.

In this second sense, utterances are the elements whose meaning we study in

pragmatics. Leech also mentions the goals of an utterance. The term goal is more

neutral than intention, because it does not commit its user to dealing with conscious

volition or motivation, but can be used generally of goal-oriented activities. The term

intention can be misleading on this score. (Leech 1982, 13-14)

§1.2 Conversational Implicature

We commonly draw a distinction between what a person's words literally mean and

what a person means by his or her words over and above what his or her words literally

mean. In "Logic and Conversation" (1975) Grice offered a theory of the latter sort of

meaning, which he called conversational implicature. Grice's explanation of

conversational implicature begins with his articulation of a Cooperative Principle,

which calls on a speaker to "make your conversational contribution such as is required,

at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk

exchange in which you are engaged" (1989, p. 26). The Cooperative Principle

subsumes a number of submaxims, such as "Make your contribution as informative as

is required", "Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence", "Be relevant",

and "Avoid obscurity". In terms of the Cooperative Principle, conversational

implicature can be defined as follows (not a quotation, but see 1989, p. 30-31): A

speaker conversationally implicates that qby saying that pif and only if (1) he or she

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摘要：

ABSTRACTAfilmcanbeconsideredgoodnotonlybecauseofitsexcellent,exquisiteandmagnificentpictures,butalsobecauseoftheconversationsbetweenthecharacters.Sometimes,thelinescanalwaysberememberedandtheybecomeclassical.Theconversationisthecoreofafilmandexcellentlinesofactorsandactressesareindispensabletoagoodf...

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