Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 8:1 (2012), 85-113.

Richard Janney
University of Munich

PRAGMATICS AND CINEMATIC DISCOURSE

Abstract
This article introduces what I will call 'cinematic discourse' as a potential candidate for pragmatic analysis.
Cinematic discourse, as defined here, is not language use in film (dramatic dialogue, fictional conversation,
scripted interaction) but the audiovisual discourse of film narration itself: the discourse of mise-en-scène,
cinematography, montage, and sound design used by filmmakers in narrating cinematic stories. Cinematic
discourse is filmmakers' main expressive vehicle and primary form of communication with, and influence
over, film viewers. The article describes how staging, camera work, editing, and other conventional
cinematic depictive practices are used to capture attention, shape perspectives, guide perceptions, and steer
viewers' inferences about the unfolding narrative. The first half of the article describes different modes of
cinematic depiction and their metapragmatic functions; the second discusses issues of cinematic
focalization and attention, film co-text as context, cinematic pragmatic acts, audiovisual inferences, film
deixis, and camera discourse roles. The goal of the article is to broadly outline some features of cinematic
discourse that warrant attention in media pragmatics and to point out challenges that would have to be met
in the future in developing pragmatic approaches to investigating these.

Keywords
cinematic discourse, cinematic metacommuncation, cinema and attention, film co-text as context, cinematic
pragmatic acts, audiovisual inferences, film deixis, camera discourse roles

1. Introduction

This article is rooted in the notion, dating back to the now nearly forgotten psychotherapeutic classic
Pragmatics of Human Communication (Watzlawick, Beavin and Jackson, 1967), that pragmatic theory
offers a useful starting point for analyzing many forms of human communication beyond language
discourse proper. The focus of the article is on cinema, which has become a topic of interest in media
pragmatics only within about the past decade. Today's media pragmatic film research is strongly influenced
by the methodology and mind-set of research on television drama, which takes scripted conversation in
fictional interaction as its object of investigation, focusing on what scholars refer to variously as 'the
language of fictional television' (Bednarek, 2010), ‘television discourse’ (Lorenzo-Dus, 2009), ‘television
dialogue’ (Quaglio, 2009), or ‘television dramatic dialogue’ (Richardson, 2010). An underlying assumption
is that dialogue in television drama can be seen as a type of language in use and approached with roughly
similar methods and pragmatic questions as those used in analyzing natural discourse. Media pragmatic
film research continues this practice but shifts the discursive locus from television to cinema and re-labels
the subject ‘the language of films’ (Piazza, Bednarek and Rossi, 2011), ‘film dialogue’ (Rossi, 2011), or
‘film discourse’ (Dynel, 2011). Approaches to television and film discourse today remain very similar, and,
in fact, a new term – ‘telecinematic discourse’ (Piazza, Bednarek and Rossi, 2011) – has recently been
coined in recognition of this.
This article breaks with this practice, addressing a form of cinematic communication that has been all
but ignored in media pragmatics up to now. In the spirit of Rachel Giora (1996) and her colleagues at Tel
Aviv University in the 1990s, I will label it cinematic discourse in the hope of distinguishing it from ‘film
discourse’ as described above. Cinematic discourse has been understood in film theory since the 1970s as a
form of communication not in film but through it (cf. Metz, 1974). It is not the use of language in film
(film dialogue, scripted conversation, fictional interaction) but the audiovisual discourse of film narration
itself: the discourse of mise-en-scène, cinematography, montage, and sound editing used in narrating
cinematic stories to viewers. Cinematic discourse originates in the conventions of film-making: in heuristic
practices of cinematic staging, camera work, editing, post-production, etc. And it is the filmmaker’s main
expressive vehicle and primary form of communication with, and influence over, the audience. Through it,
filmmakers guide spectators’ attention, shape their perspectives, color their perceptions, and steer their
inferences about the unfolding narrative. Through cinematic discourse, filmmakers suggest to viewers how
characters and dramatic events are to be seen and heard, how they are to be interpreted, and ultimately how
film itself is to be understood. It is a type of metapragmatic discourse stemming from the cinematic
depiction of the story that signals subjective relations, evokes feelings, and triggers inferences about film
meaning.
The influence of cinematic discourse on film interpretation makes it a potentially interesting candidate
for pragmatic analysis, but despite ambitious studies of narrative comprehension in recent decades in
cognitive stylistics (cf. Ryan, 1991; Emmott, 1997; Werth, 1999; Gavins, 2007), narratology (Banfield,
1982; Fludernik, 2010), and cognitive film theory (Bordwell, 1985, 1989; Buckland, 1995, 2000; Branigan,
1984, 2006), an adequate pragmatic theoretical framework for this kind of research is still lacking. The
article attempts to take a small step in this direction, outlining some features of cinematic discourse that
warrant pragmatic attention and pointing out some challenges that would have to be overcome in
developing pragmatically based approaches to them. The first half of the article discusses different forms of
filmic expression and their pragmatic functions in cinematic discourse; the second discusses issues of
filmic contextualization, focalization, interpretation, and deictic reference. The goal is not to present a
systematically articulated pragmatic theory of cinematic discourse but to clear conceptual ground for
further work toward one.

2. Modeling cinematic discourse

“A work of art is a conscious human effort
that has to do with communication. It is
that or it is nothing.”
Orson Welles (in Estrin, 2002: 144)

The concept of cinematic discourse invites us to focus on film as a communication process. It assumes
that the public screening of a film is inherently a communicative event. Films are made to be seen, and they
are intended to have cognitive and emotional meaning for their spectators. Their production and reception
are complementary activities in a public discursive process. A film is consciously addressed to its viewers.
As the addressees of this process, the viewers are no less involved in the construction of its meaning than
the filmmaker. A sense of shared meaning emerges not through the simple convergence of the filmmaker’s
and viewer’s gazes on the screen, but through a convergence of their viewpoints. When this happens, it is
possible to speak of filmic intersubjectivity, a condition in which the eye of the camera is experienced as
being located in the mind of the viewer.
Film theory since the 1950s has attempted to approach this process by separating problems of film
authorship (style, creativity, expressivity, intentionality), film form (film language, syntax, semantics), and
film spectatorship (film perception, narrative comprehension, interpretation) into separate categories and
studying these as independent subjects. A pragmatic approach to cinematic discourse would depart from
this practice, seeking a unified account of relations between filmmakers, films, and film viewers in classical
pragmatic terms. The aim would be to forge a theoretical standpoint from which film making and film
viewing can be understood as interrelated aspects of a complex form of public audiovisual discourse. This,
in fact, was the aim of early pioneers of artistic Soviet silent film like Sergei Eisenstein (1942, 1949),
Vsevolod Pudovkin (1949), and Dziga Vertov (1984), among others.
Thus modeled, cinematic discourse would be seen as a situated narrative process involving:
• a storyteller (filmmaker) and audience (spectators)
• a medium of expression (the technical cinematic apparatus)
• a conventional communication setting (movie-going)
• a shared communication space (the screen)
• common discursive assumptions and expectations (filmic metapragmatic awareness)
• an implicit communicative pact between the participants (a cooperative assumption).

2
And it would be assumed to follow pragmatic principles analogous to, if not in all instances identical to,
those underlying other forms of public communication: it would be seen to be goal-directed, involve
intentional agents, employ a shared medium, require a certain amount of common knowledge and assumed
sincerity, and so forth.

2.1 Plato's cave revisited

“[In a movie theater] you’re in a tunnel [...]

where this oblong of light has your
complete attention.”
John Huston (in Long, 2001: 45)

The cinematic experience has sometimes been compared with Plato’s allegory of the cave (see Figure
1). In the allegory, Socrates describes a group of prisoners chained to a wall in a dark, underground den.
Behind the wall, a fire burns, casting shadows of objects carried to and fro by puppeteers onto the wall
before them. Having seen nothing since childhood but these shadows, the prisoners are accustomed to
regarding them as real objects and even attribute the murmurings of the puppeteers to them. The images
have come to occupy their complete attention, and over time, the prisoners have developed the habit of, in
Socrates’ words, “conferring honors among themselves on those who [are] quickest to observe the passing
shadows and remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together, and
who [are| therefore best able to draw conclusions” about them.

Figure 1. Plato’s cave.

There are analogies in Plato’s allegory to most of the basic features of the cinematic experience: a
theater, a film production team, a primitive cinematic apparatus, an audiovisual narrative, its projection
onto a screen, and the spectators. As film viewers, we too sit in rows like Plato’s prisoners, in a darkened
space, in a state of isolation and sensory deprivation, focusing our attention on a flow of images and sounds
projected from behind by an oblong stream of light onto the screen before us. The allegory points to three
prototypical dimensions of film communication: (1) filmmaking as a communicative audiovisual activity
addressed to a captive audience, (2) film images and sounds as expressive devices for their makers and as
objects of attention for their viewers, and (3) film viewing itself as a constructive activity aimed at
interpreting cinematic sequences. It further suggests that cinema viewing takes place in a special space
reserved for an experience set apart from the rest of life – a space divorced from outer context (cf. Berger,
1972: 25).
Context is constructed in cinema largely from within, through the sequential accumulation of co-text,
with each shot providing audiovisual information contextualizing others, acting first as a figure against the
ground of preceding shots, then receding into background to become part of the accumulating context for
what comes next (see Section 3). We draw conclusions about films in a manner similar to that of Plato’s
prisoners: by making inferences about shots in image sequences and conceptually putting these together

3
into stories in our minds. The reality of the shadows for Plato’s prisoners, we should remember, was in
their minds – an imagined reality. Looking at shadows, they were seeing things. Something similar happens
in the movie theater when we look at the actors on the screen and see them as characters in the story, as in
Figure 2, for example, where, looking at the shadow of actor Max Schreck in Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s
Nosferatu (1922), we see the monster Graf Orlok.

Figure 2. Max Schreck’s shadow as Graf Orlok.

In film, looking is an act of attention, but seeing is an act of imagination (cf. McGinn, 2007: 40-41).
Patterns of light, movement, and sound transform the screen into a world that we, as spectators, imagine – a
world that we project ourselves from the fleeting, fragmentary images passing before our eyes and attempt
to understand on its own terms. But contrary to ordinary experience, in this world, perceptions often seem
almost beyond our control: instead of our gaze traveling outwards, it is sometimes almost as if the images
seem to unwind behind our eyes (cf. John Huston in Long, 2001: 44-49). This is an illusion created by the
cinematic apparatus steering our attention (cf. Baudry, 1974). Pragmatically speaking, the cinematic story
and everything in it is a product of audiovisual inference (see Section 3).

2.2 Subsystems of cinematic discourse

“A filmic work of art is [an expressive

event] in which every partial expression
derives its meaning from its place within
the whole system.”
Jan Peters (1981: 64-65)

The influence of cinematic discourse on attention and perception is an effect of expressive uses of the
film production system in the context described above. Nearly every choice a filmmaker makes in telling a
cinematic story is an expressive one. Like an orchestra director, the filmmaker coordinates the activities of
a large team of artists and artisans working together on different parts of the film during its production.
Before the film can be screened, it must be conceived, written, storyboarded, staged, enacted, filmed, edited
into a narrative, remixed, and overlaid with sounds, subtitles, music, and other post-production effects.
Each production phase requires expressive choices and employs techniques that modify the results of those
before.
An important step toward developing a pragmatic approach to cinematic discourse is thus first to
consider the technical apparatus behind it – the expressive means of cinema available to the filmmaker, the
conventions governing their use, and the functions of the different techniques in filmic communication. A
complex hybrid system, the technical cinematic apparatus is multimodal and multicoded, consisting of
numerous smaller expressive subsystems, each with its own heuristic practices, forms, and discursive
functions:
• language: spoken dialogue, off-screen narration, written and printed text, titles, subtitles,
intertitles, credits, etc.

4
 • staging: scene and setting composition, decor, props, colors, actors, costumes, makeup, lighting,
choreography etc.
• gesture: actors’ gazes, facial expressions, hand gestures, postures, etc.
• cinematography: camera placements, angles, perspectives, movements, focus, framing, etc.
• editing: temporal and conceptual patterns in the organization of camera shots into sequences.
• post-production: sound mixing, musical scoring, and the addition of nondiegetic acoustic, visual,
and digital effects.
Interplay between these subsystems makes cinematic discourse as much a complex process of
interpretation from the filmmaker’s perspective as it is an object of interpretation from the spectator’s. The
outcome, if the film is well made, is a unified whole in which the combined effects of language, staging,
acting, filming, editing, and post-production merge into a single flow of speech, sound, and visual imagery
telling a story and developing certain themes, motifs, and central points. Although shaped by many hands, a
film is ultimately no less an expression of the filmmaker’s interpretation of the dramatic material than a
symphony is an expression of the director’s interpretation of the score.

2.3 Cinematic discourse as metacommunication

“[...] we can split the discourses of the

characters from their situation and
compare what is said in these discourses
with what has been revealed to us through
narration.”
Colin MacCabe (1985: 37)

Both linguistic and audiovisual information have important functions in cinematic discourse, and their
effects are complexly interrelated. Although we tend to be more consciously aware of a film’s actors,
dialogue, and dramatic action than of their audiovisual depiction on the screen, the preponderance of
nonverbal subsystems in the list above suggests that the amount of subliminal information provided by
staging, cinematography, editing, and the other nonverbal subsystems far exceeds the amount of
information expressed linguistically through dialogue, off-screen narrators, inserted text, and so forth.
As a case in point, we could consider the relationships between dialogue, staging, and cinematography
in the following scene at the end of Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law (1986). In the film, three men, Zack
(Tom Waits), Jack (John Lurie), and Roberto (Roberto Benigni) break out of a Louisiana jail, escape
through a swamp, and find refuge late at night in an isolated cafe in the forest operated by Nicoletta
(Nicoletta Braschi). Overnight, Roberto and Nicoletta – both Italians – fall in love. The scene occurs during
breakfast the next morning, as the trio discusses what to do next (see Example 1):

(1) Breakfast table dialogue – Down by Law (Jarmusch, 1986).

Roberto: So, but. You’re sure you must leave today? Why we cannot stay for sometimes first?

Zack: Well it’s too dangerous out there Bob. There’s probably an APB out on all of us. We’re
gonna have to keep going.

Nicoletta: And where do you go now?

Zack: I’ll probably head out West. Los Angeles.

Roberto: And you, my friend Jack. Where do you go?

Jack: Well, if he’s goin to L.A., I’m gonna go East, know what I mean?

Roberto: Yes, I know what you mean... Well, some music, yeah?

(Roberto turns on the jukebox, and he and Nicoletta dance as Zack and Jack look on from
the back of the room.)

You are sure you must leave today. I stay.

5
 It is instructive to compare the information communicated by the scripted dialogue here with the
information communicated by the scene’s staging and cinematography. The dialogue mainly propels the
narrative and contributes to its coherence and cohesiveness. From it, we learn that a manhunt makes staying
in the cafe dangerous, and that the three men must now make a decision, but that each has a different plan:
Zack wants to go West; if he does this, Jack intends to head East; and Roberto plans to stay in the cafe with
Nicoletta. After sharing prison, the jailbreak, and the hardships of the swamp together earlier in the film,
the trio at the core of the narrative is breaking up. This is the main information provided by the linguistic
dialogue: ideational, diegetic information explaining what literally is happening and identifying the scene
as a turning point in the narrative. Beyond this, the dialogue suggests relatively little about the characters’
personalities, relationships, or feelings, or about the scene’s thematic significance in relation to the rest of
the film. We glean from it only perhaps that Roberto is an integrative figure and Jack does not want to be
associated with Zack.

Figure 3. Breakfast table scene – Down by Law (Jarmusch, 1986).

If we turn to the scene’s visual representation, we see that the information contributed by staging and
cinematography is different in kind from the information provided by the dialogue. Figure 3 is from the last
shot in the scene, in which Roberto, dancing with Nicoletta, informs Zack and Jack that he is not leaving.
The scene is illuminated by a soft key light on the dancing couple, a fill light illuminating the background,
and a bright backlight from the window edge lighting Zack’s bowed head and sloping shoulder. The
position of the camera and the placement of the actors divide the room visually into two spaces, with
Roberto and Nicoletta well lit and sharply focused in the foreground, and Zack and Jack out of focus in the
background. As Roberto and Nicoletta dance in the foreground, preoccupied with each other, Zack and
Jack sit despondently in the background, watching in isolation, avoiding each other visually and bodily,
each with an arm crossed over his stomach. The close, eye-level position of the camera relative to the
dancers makes the figures of Zack and Jack in the background appear small and extraneous. Our attention
is riveted to the lovers. The contribution of staging and cinematography here is not to further our
comprehension of the narrative itself, but to depict the characters’ relationships and the emotional dynamics
of the situation. We see two characters large in the frame who are embracing life, and two, smaller and
lower in the back, who cannot.
A division of functions is apparent in the contrast between the linguistic information and the
information communicated by staging and cinematography: the scripted dialogue tells us what is
happening, while the staging and cinematography show us how it is happening. The former information is
essentially diegetic, while the latter is essentially mimetic. In their book Pragmatics of Human
Communication, Watzlawick, Beavin and Jackson (1967: 52) distinguish between information comprising a
communicative event’s literal content (or ‘report’ dimension), and metainformation indicating how the
content is to be interpreted or understood (the ‘command’ dimension). Likening these to the data and
processing instructions fed into pocket calculators, they say that in order for a calculator to multiply two
figures, it needs raw data (the two figures) and a command to do something with the data (the instruction to
multiply). Partners in face-to-face conversation need these two types of information as well, and indeed,

6
Watzlawick et al. suggest the understandability of human communication in general rests on interplay
between content information (e.g., you, give, book, me) and metainformation about how the content is to be
taken (e.g., ‘this is an order’, ‘I’m joking’) (1967: 53). In face-to-face conversation, they claim, content is
communicated mainly through language, while the metainformation required for fully interpreting it is
communicated by the body, via analogical, more/less contrasts: changing intonations, voice qualities,
gazes, facial expressions, gestures, postures, body alignments, and so forth.
A pragmatic approach to cinematic discourse could begin with the hypothesis that its role in film is in
some ways analogous to the body’s metacommunicative role in face-to-face interaction. In film, as in
speech, visual metacommunication does not simply exist side by side with linguistic content but actively
complements and modifies it in every shot. Cinematic discourse’s mode of expression is predominantly
gradient, like the body’s – a matter of analogical contrasts. The major features of lighting (direction,
quality, color, brightness and shadow, etc.) are all gradient, as are the major perspectival features of
cinematography (depth of field and focus, frame size and shape, camera distance, height, angle, movement,
etc.) and many film editing conventions (fades, dissolves, wipes, inserts, graphic matches, visual rhythmic
patterns, temporal and spatial contrasts, etc.). This may have prompted Christian Metz’s remark that “a film
is always understood, but always more or less so, and this ‘more or less’ is not easily quantifiable” (1974:
72).
Actually, every lighting technique, frame compositional strategy, camera movement, transitional fade,
dissolve, etc. constitutes a way of seeing the action that provides clues for interpreting its significance.
Different depictive choices, Metz claimed, correspond to different “intentions of a seeing” (1974: 71): a
zoom forward on a detail is a way of seeing that detail. In a similar vein, Colin MacCabe (1985) says that
dramatic cinema is always accompanied by a kind of dematerialized, depictive metadiscourse that
‘comments on’ or ‘interpellates’ the dramatic discourse proper. This occurs through the cinematic
representation of the dramatic action. Cinematography especially, he says, provides an ongoing
commentary on the action, framing it, perspectivizing it, and interpreting it in a manner resembling the
narrating voice of the author in the classic realist novel. Hence, according to MacCabe, we can speak of a
sort of hierarchy in fictional cinema in which the dramatic discourse is positioned or set-up to be
interpreted in particular ways by the depictive discourse (1985: 35). This latter metacommunicative
discourse is what I have been calling ‘cinematic discourse’.

3. Cinematic context, focalization, and inference

Earlier I said that the immediate context of cinematic interpretation develops sequentially through the
accumulation of co-text, with each shot acting at first as a figure against the ground of preceding shots and
then merging into the background to become part of the context for what comes next; and I hypothesized
that film interpretation involves focalizing on certain filmic details rather than others (acts of attention),
and making inferences about their significance in the context of their appearance (acts of imagination) (see
Section 2.1). From this, it follows that developing a pragmatic approach to cinematic discourse requires us
to consider the triadic relation between film co-text, focalization, and cinematic inferences.

3.1 Film co-text as context

An illustration of the effects of accumulating co-text occurs in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up

(1966), where a fashion photographer seeking a motif (David Hemmings) secretly takes a series of
photographs of two lovers in a park. When they discover him, the woman (Vanessa Redgrave) rushes
toward him and desperately tries to take his camera (Figure 4). Later in his studio, puzzled by this reaction,
the photographer begins inspecting the photo sequence, his gaze moving chronologically from one shot to
the next, constructing a silent visual narrative. A photograph of the couple embracing in the middle of the
sequence arrests his attention (Figure 5). Why, in the midst of being embraced, should the woman be
gazing intently toward the perimeter of the park (Figure 6)? Following this visual pointer, the photographer
begins making enlargements of the edge of the park and discovers what looks like a figure behind the fence
hidden in the trees (Figure 7). Further enlargements reveal what looks like a gun in the figure’s hand

7
(Figures 8 & 9). On the basis of these perceptions, the photographer infers (incorrectly, as it turns out) that
his discovery by the woman has foiled an attempted murder.

Figure 4. Angry woman in the park. Figure 5. Lovers embracing in the park.
Blow-up (Antonioni, 1966)

Figure 6. Woman gazing toward the edge of Figure 7. Figure behind fence in the trees.
the park.

Figure 8. Man behind the fence. Figure 9. Close-up of gun in man’s hand.

The photographer in this scene is like a spectator in a movie. The photographs operate like shots in a
film sequence. The photographer’s attention is aroused by the woman’s reaction to being photographed,
and turns by stages, through her gaze into the trees, to the figure discovered there and the weapon

8
apparently in the figure’s hand. Notice that although the photographer himself makes the inferences, they
are embedded in, and constrained by, the situation in which they arise. Both his shifts of attention (from the
couple, to the woman, to the man in the trees) and his evolving inferences (she is looking at something;
there is a man with a gun behind the fence; this is a murder attempt) are activated by context. The
progression of images in this sequence represents a cinematic contextualization process in miniature worth
investigating more closely from a pragmatic point of view.

3.2 Cinema and attention

“[...] filmic communication, to a large

extent, depends on the filmmaker’s control
of the audience’s attention.”
Noel Carroll (2003: 26)
As mentioned earlier, when we watch a film, our attention is largely beyond our conscious control.
What we attend to, and when, is for the most part determined by the filmmaker’s choices in making and
assembling the image sequences we perceive. It is not we who withdraw our concentration from some
things in order to focalize more effectively with others, as William James put it in his discussion of
attention in Principles of Psychology (1950, Vol. 1: 403-404), but the filmmaker. We are thus obliged at all
times in film to try to infer on a shot-to-shot basis why certain story details are focalized at particular
moments as opposed to others.
Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), for example, is constructed entirely around a newspaper reporter’s
attempts to discover the meaning of publishing tycoon Charles Foster Kane’s dying utterance ‘Rosebud’
(Figure 10). Although he interviews several people who were close to Kane, he never solves the mystery.
But the audience does, with the help of visual clues pointing its attention toward the answer (Figures 11-
13).

Figure 10. Kane uttering ‘Rosebud’ on his Figure 11. Snow globe in Kane’s
death bed. Citzen Kane (Welles, 1941) dying hand.

Figure 12. Kane’s childhood home & sled Figure 13. ‘Rosebud’ burning after Kane's
in Colorado. death.

Noel Carroll (2003) reviews a number of cinematic possibilities for arresting viewers’ attention and
guiding it to appropriate objects. Among the means of arresting attention, he lists: the darkened theater, the

9
illuminated screen, the scale of film images, movement or activity in the shot frame, movement of the shot
frame itself, movement from one locale to another, abrupt editing transitions, cuts, cutting ratios,
superimpositions, wipes, inserts, dissolves, flipped images, etc. (Carroll, 2003: 27-30). Guiding attention,
on the other hand, he says, is accomplished mainly through reframing: for example, representations of
events from different camera angles or distances through lens choices (rack focusing, zooming in or out),
camera movement (boom shot, panning, tracking, dolly shot, hand-held camera, steadycam), choices of
what is inside versus outside the frame (inclusionary/exclusionary bracketing), scaling (close-ups, cuts
between long shots and close-ups), sharp focus on main characters, soft focus on others, movement against
a static background, an unmoving subject against a moving background, light colors on dark fields, dark
colors on light fields, characters’ eyelines and pointing gestures, enhanced illumination on main characters,
central positioning of significant events or characters in the frame, etc. (Carroll, 2003: 34-39). Such
techniques, he says, steer viewers’ attention through time, fixing it on the screen, guiding it to salient
elements in the narrative, and ultimately determining not only what the viewers see, but also how and when
they see it.
The techniques discussed by Carroll are all basic tools of cinematic discourse taught in film schools
and explained in handbooks on film language (Arijon, 1991), cinematic storytelling (Van Sijll, 2005),
directing (Rabiger, 2008), cinematography (Mascelli,1998), editing (O'Steen, 2009), and so forth.
Understanding their forms, uses, and dramatic functions is of fundamental importance in filmmaking.
Nevertheless, the notion of attention control alone only explains how filmmakers give salience to particular
objects, actions, characters, or story events and thereby mark these for viewers as elements in the film to be
noted, remembered, or interpreted. It does not explain how inferences about their significance come about.
There remains a need for a pragmatic theory of cinematic interpretation.

3.3 Cinematic context, pragmatic acts, and interpretation

“Nomenclature aside, it is clear that the

final question is to determine what things
mean in a situation.”
Jacob Mey (2010: 2883)

The photo sequence in Blow-Up (Figures 4-9) demonstrates that our interpretable perceptual
experience as film viewers is largely an experience of relationships (cf. Watzlawick et al., 1967: 27).
Attending to individual images alone, in the absence of the images preceding and following them, is not
sufficient in itself to generate cinematic inferences. Inferences, in a broad sense, involve relations between
assumptions about things presumed to be known and perceptions in context. Film perception progresses
linearly through time, requiring the constant comparison of audiovisual events in relation to each other in
the immediate narrative context, as well as in relation to contexts experienced earlier in the film. Where we
literally ‘are’ at any given point in a film is a temporary position in the unfolding narrative relative to that
which has happened and that which is in the process of happening. Cinematic inferences are at all times
contextually embedded.
The basis of the photographer’s interpretations of the photos in the Blow-Up scene invites pragmatic
reflection. What triggers the inferences? We could begin by noting that the salience of each of the three key
events in the scene – the attempt to take the camera (Figure 4), the gaze toward the edge of the park (Figure
6), and the gun in the hand of the figure in the woods (Figure 9) – is marked by its size and centrality in the
shot frame. Their interpreted significance, however, seems not to arise only from the fact that they are
focalized in the sequence, but that they happen exactly as they do in relation to each other in the context in
which they are perceived by the photographer as he reconstructs his visual narrative. In a sense, we could
say, their implications in the situation are not so much inferred as recognized.
Jacob Mey’s theory of pragmatic acts provides a useful explanation of this type of recognition (cf.
Mey 2001, 2006, 2010). The theory foregrounds the importance of the contextual embeddedness of
communicative acts in their interpretation. Conceived as an alternative to logocentric accounts of utterance
interpretation in speech act theory, it shifts the target of interpretation from interactants’ intentions to
situational affordances. A pragmatic act, Mey says, is an act that prepares or pre-tunes us to expect a certain
type of behavior that in some way ‘makes sense’ in the context of the altered situation it creates. When this
behavior occurs, we tend to recognize it and interpret it in keeping with our expectations in the situation:

10
“We conclude or infer [its significance] on the basis not only of what we hear or observe in the situation,
but [also] in accordance with our being ‘set up’ to hear and observe exactly that” (Mey, 2010: 2883).
In film, as in everyday life, situations constrain the types of things that can happen in them; and
conversely, events can reaffirm, modify, or disconfirm an existing situation. In general, however, we expect
things to happen within their possibilities in the confines of the situation. This is the meaning of situated
action: action that is possible within the constraints and affordances of the situation (Mey, 2001: 219). But
the fact that every action in a sequence of actions constituting a ‘situation’ grows out of the situation and in
turn becomes part of its ongoing evolution subtly changes things. It means that situations are no longer
static, pre-determined frames around events but evolving, dynamic environments in which the interpretable
significance of individual actions arises from their embeddedness in the events in which they occur and
from whatever further events or modifications of the situation they may trigger or ‘set up’.
In this sense, the three key diegetic actions in the Blow-Up scene are pragmatic acts par excellence.
The attempt to take the camera is causally connected to the preceding photographs, but the occurrence of
this event creates a new situation for the photographer that sets him up to reconsider what happened in the
park. The woman’s gaze toward the edge of the park midway through the sequence creates yet another new
situation setting him up to look for what she was gazing at. And the discovery of the figure in the trees with
a gun completes the situational metamorphosis, setting the photographer up to review the relations between
the three actions in his mind’s eye. It is at this point that he realizes that he has inadvertently foiled a
murder attempt. In Mey’s theory of pragmatic acts, this realization is less attributable to rational reasoning
than to the shaping influence of the shifting constraints and affordances of the evolving situation.
In numerous small ways, this principle seems to operate continuously in film, even in modest continuity
editing techniques nearly out of awareness where one shot in a sequence sets up the conditions for
understanding the next, as in eyeline match (Figure 14), match on action (Figure 15), establishing shots,
shot-reverse-shot sequences, and so forth.

Figure 14. Eyeline match in Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941).

Figure 15. Match on action in Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941).

11
 The point here is that in film, as in everyday life, our interpretations of situations are often relatively
automatic. Rather than being deductive (as formal speech act theory would have it) or inductive (as
conversation analysis would have it), our conclusions about ‘what is happening’ in a given filmic situation
are often abductive in the Peircean sense – rooted in an ongoing common sense type of associative
reasoning about relations between our assumptions and perceptions within, and constrained by, the
evolving filmic context.

4. Camera discourse roles

The influence of evolving context on interpretation is perhaps nowhere more evident than in our
inferences about the camera’s different discourse roles in cinematic narration. Camera deixis is an area
where cinema diverges radically from linguistic discourse. The deictic system of language is traditionally
regarded as a group of lexical and grammatical features that enable interlocutors to denote each other’s
roles in the immediate discourse situation and plot out the locations of objects of reference in discourse
space and time – essentially, a system of coordinates indicating who is speaking to whom, where, and when
(see Figure 16). Following Karl Bühler’s (1934) situational concept of deixis, the system is assumed to be
organized around a speaker interacting with an addressee in a shared perceptual field; and the speaker is
regarded as the experiential ‘origo’, ‘locus’, ‘zero point’, or ‘I, here, now’ of deictic reference at the core of
the system (cf. Bühler, 1934).

1st person 2nd person 3rd person

him – her
I, here, now say 'x' to you about this – that
now – then

Figure 16. The field of deictic reference in linguistic discourse.

4.1 The camera as deictic locus

The Bühler model’s egocentric view of deixis, which adopts the speaker’s body as its anchor point and
assumes a stable discourse situation in which speaker, addressee, and discourse referents are all co-present
and mutually accessible (Hanks, 2005: 196), is problematic as a model of cinematographic deixis. The first
problem is the fact that the camera – the deictic locus of cinematic discourse – is not anchored in a stable
discourse situation like the situation postulated in the model. Cinematic contexts (see Section 3.3) are not
static templates or frames surrounding the camera’s references to dramatic events but evolving
environments in which the camera and its objects are embedded, moved about for different reasons, and put
into constantly shifting spatial and perspectival relations. The editing of shots from different positions and
perspectives into narrative sequences results in a radical destabilization of the camera’s point of view and
of its discursive relations to its objects and viewers (cf. Casetti, 1998; Branigan, 1984, 2006). Cinematic
discourse is an accrual of audiovisual fragments. Viewers have to reassemble the fragments into
meaningful relations, like the photographer in Blow-Up, by making contextual inferences filling in the gaps
between them.
Second, a movie camera is not ‘a center of experience’ like a human being endowed with discursive
awareness, spatiotemporal consciousness, and the logical referential resources of language. Whatever
human agency is attributed to it is projected into it by its viewers (cf. Branigan, 2006). A camera is simply
a visual recording device, which, however expressively it may be used in the hands of a cinematographer,
has no language. As a communicator primarily of analogical, relational information (see Section 2.3, Figure
3), the camera thus has nothing comparable to the lexical forms and grammatical categories of linguistic

12
deixis. Personal, spatial, temporal, and other deictic relations between the camera and its objects and
viewers are not logically encoded into the image track but arise through contextual inferences.
Third, a movie camera alone cannot visually represent either itself as the source of what it records (a
first person I) or the viewer as the addressee of its representations (a second person you). Rather, it refers
directly only to the objects in its field of vision: actors, actions, things, and events in the filmed enactment
of the drama itself (third person he’s, she’s, it’s, them’s, etc.). And because the camera cannot refer directly
to itself, it also does not visually represent to its own spatial location. Wherever it is placed is ‘here’ and
whatever is in front of it is ‘there’, but the physical locations of these coordinates in the story have to be
inferred by the viewer in the context of the imagined world triggered by the screen.
It is thus difficult to explain viewers’ inferences about camera discourse roles and cinematic spaces if we
assume that the basic features of the cinematic discourse situation – its deictic locus, participant role
structure, and spatiotemporal contextual anchoring – all remain stable during cinematic narration. The
perceptual coordinates of camera deixis change constantly.

4.2 Contextual fields and camera deixis

The instability of the deictic locus of cinematic discourse is a consequence of the camera’s
embeddedness simultaneously in three intersecting contextual fields (proponents of literary possible worlds
theories [Ryan, 1991] or text world theories [Gavins, 2007] would call them 'worlds') – the production
field, the story field, and the viewing field – all of which converge through the projection of the film onto
the perceptual field of the screen (see Figure 17). Each field is an evolving context in its own right, with its
own participation structures and spatiotemporal characteristics. Inferences about the camera’s discourse
roles and spatial locations vary depending on the field in which it is assumed to be operating.

Story
Field

Screen
Viewing Production
Viewer Perceptual Field Camera
Field Field

Figure 17. Fields of deictic reference in cinematic discourse.

The production field, as its name suggests, is the context in which the film is literally made. While
film production activities mentioned in Section 2.2 all take place in this field, its main relevance here is as
the situational context in which the movie camera makes a visual record of the enactment of the dramatic
action by the actors. Filming takes place in a physical setting composed, constructed, and illuminated
expressly for this purpose by the production crew. Filming the action can involve any number of takes of
different lengths, from different distances, positions, and perspectives, made in different locations at
different times. The temporal order of the making of the individual shots of the final product is determined
by practical considerations rather than dramatic, communicative, or aesthetic ones. The production
processes results in a great number of fragmentary images of different bits and pieces of the dramatic
action, most of these doomed in advance to be discarded, which are then compared, sorted, and selected by
the filmmaker, and eventually organized into the narrative sequences edited into the film’s image track. The

13
production field, we could say, is the context in which the filmmaker determines the camera’s general
deictic ‘behavior’ or filming strategies with respect to its objects in the film (cf. Peters, 1981).
The story field is in a double sense an imagined field: it is a narrative goal from the filmmaker’s
standpoint and an inferential achievement from the viewer’s. From the filmmaker’s perspective, it is the
narrative that he or she attempts to forge out of the audiovisual fragments produced during the film’s
making – the intended story shaped after the filmmaker’s artistic and intellectual inclinations, whose
characters, events, scenes, and dramatic actions are hoped to trigger certain emotions, thoughts, wishes,
interpretations, and realizations in the audience. From the viewers’ perspective, the story field is the
dramatic world brought into being by the audiovisual narrative. Often unaware that this world is in large
measure a product of his or her own cinematic inferences (see above), the viewer attends to the fragmented
representations of characters and actions on the screen, constructing out of these a coherent narrative
progression like the photographer in Blow-Up, inferring the story’s actions, character roles, and imagined
spatial and temporal dimensions. For both filmmaker and viewer, the story field extends beyond the borders
of its representation in screen space: it is in part ‘there’ perceptually, and in part a creation of the mind’s
eye. This accounts for why two individuals watching the same film can feel that they have seen different
stories, why the narrative structures and strategies of filmmakers sometimes go unrecognized by their
audiences, and why monuments of film history like Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) could be box office
flops at the time they were released.
The viewing field is the context in which films are watched and interpreted by their audiences. While
it is constrained by all of the conditions described in Section 2.1 and manipulated by all of the attention
controlling mechanisms discussed in Section 3.2, it can be regarded as the immediate context of the
audience’s perception and interpretation of the film’s image track. Here, the audience watches the drama
unfolding on the screen, experiencing the flow of images projected by the beam of the projector. It is in this
field that the actors are transformed through the viewer’s identification with them into dramatic figures
capable of eliciting empathy, fear, laughter, and tears. It is the field where emotions are triggered, where
thematic meanings are imagined, and where the viewer attempts to understand the story’s intended
significance. In the viewing field, the discourse role of the camera is that of a visual narrator. Here, it is not
perceived as a cinematic tool or content provider as in the production field, but as an all-pervading shaping
and perspectivizing force in the narration of the drama itself – an active agent steering the viewer’s
attention through the story’s salient dramatic events and points. The more actively the camera appears to
move about in the story field, the greater and more immediate its effect becomes in the viewing field.

4.3 Contextual embeddedness and the perceived ownership of the deictic locus

Camera discourse often contradicts the common sense assumption inherited from linguistics that the
deictic locus of film – the narrating eye of the camera – must be located in a first person ‘I’ agent. Although
the camera has an optical mechanism analogous to an eye, it lacks a pronominal ‘I’. It is not unusual for its
locus to appear to switch from positions seemingly ‘outside’ the dramatic action to positions ‘inside’ it, and
within the drama itself, to shift unpredictably between the perspectives of different characters in the story
(third person ‘thems’). The mobility of a film’s visual locus is indeed so great that understanding camera
reference might sometimes seem almost impossible in theory were it not so effortless in practice. How this
happens, how we as viewers follow these deictic dislocations, and how we attribute ‘ownership’ to the
cinematic deictic locus in the ongoing narrative are intriguing pragmatic questions.
William Hanks’ (2005) work on the embeddedness of deictic practices in contextual fields opens an
interesting possibility for answering such questions. Already partly introduced in the preceding section, his
central idea is that deictic practices (personal, spatial, and temporal references) can be perceived to have
different discursive implications in different social contexts. An important factor in understanding deictic
references, in addition to the literal perceptual field in which they are produced (Bühler's Zeigfeld, see
Section 4.0, Figure 16), he says, is the situational context or ‘deictic field’ in which they are embedded at
the time they are produced. Hanks argues that “to perform an act of deictic reference is to take up a position
in [a] deictic field. Likewise, to be the object of reference is to be thrust into a position” in a deictic field
(2005: 193). Through embedding, he claims, “the meaning and force of deictic expressions are reshaped by
the field to which they articulate” (2005: 194).
This idea is interesting if we think about the contextual fields in Figure 19, because it seems that as
film viewers, we have a tendency to infer both the momentary ownership of the visual deictic locus and its

14
discourse role in the immediate situation on the basis of the field in which we perceive it to be located. The
assigning of camera references to contextual fields seems to rest on inferences about their perceived
relations to their object(s) on the screen. In the absence of co-textual indications to the contrary, the farther
the camera locus appears to be located from things in the story field, the more closely it seems to be
associated with the production field. A camera locus perceived to be located ‘outside’ the story field thus
tends to lead us to infer a narrator outside the story, for example, the filmmaker (Figure 18).

Figure 18. A story-external perspective in von Trier’s Europa (1991).

The nearer the camera locus is perceived to be located to things within the story field, the more closely
it tends to be associated with the story field itself. Hence, a camera locus perceived to be ‘inside’ the story
field tends to lead us to infer a narrator inside the story as well, a sort of bystander observer (Figure 19).

Figure 19. A story-internal perspective in von Trier’s Europa (1991).

Interestingly, the deeper the camera locus appears to be embedded in the story field, the greater its
immediacy and impact become in the viewing field (Figure 20). A camera locus perceived to be located
within a character in the story creates a sort of inferential double-bind in the viewing field, resulting in
what might be described as a ‘conflict of subjectivities’ for the viewer. In this situation, the subjective ‘I’ of
the viewer and the implied ‘I’ of the character (expressed through the eye of the camera) compete. If the
character temporarily serving as the deictic locus is directly gazed at or addressed by another character in
the story, the viewer gets the impression that he or she is being looked at or addressed in the viewing field
by the figure perceived in the story field. The story appears to be communicating with the viewer.

15
 Figure 20. A potential ‘conflict of subjectivities’ in von Trier’s Europa (1991).

It is important to remember, however, that these are only tendencies in the absence of contextual
indications to the contrary; and film discourse is indeed capable of producing such contrary indications
through shot editing. The inferred contextual field of an act of visual reference can be altered by inserting a
shot identifying its deictic locus in advance. The strategy is like the one mentioned at the end of Section 3.3
for creating eyeline matches, where we first see a character gazing in a particular direction and then see
what we perceive as the object of the character’s gaze in a second shot. The eyeline match technique, thus
regarded, is an editing strategy for connecting a visual image to a deictic locus.
Contextual indications to the contrary in film are always cinematic pragmatic acts – acts, as Jacob
Mey says, that set the viewer up to expect behaviors that in some way ‘fit’ in the contexts of the altered
situations they create (Mey, 2010: 2883). Returning to William Hanks’ statement that “to be [an] object of
reference is to be thrust into a position” (2005: 193), we could conclude that inferences about the
ownership of the deictic locus and deictic discourse roles both depend on the viewer’s being set up to make
these inferences by preceding film co-text. Hence, a close-up, as in Figure 20, does not automatically
trigger a conflict of subjectivities for the viewer if it is preceded by a shot identifying a character in the
story field as its deictic origin. And a long shot from the back wall of a room, as in Figure 18, does not
automatically trigger the inference that the narrating instance is outside the story field if it is preceded by a
shot of someone looking into the room. In such instances, the deictic reference of the first shot thrusts its
object into the position of being the locus of the second one.

5. Closing comments

In this article I have tried to call attention to cinematic discourse as a communicative practice and
encourage colleagues to begin thinking about it as a potential candidate for pragmatic analysis. But the
article merely scratches the surface of the subject’s pragmatic complexity, touching on only four broad
areas of possible research: cinematic contextualization, focalization, interpretation, and deictic reference.
Each deserves deeper treatment than it has received here, and there are many further research possibilities. I
have hoped, in any case, to show that these four central areas of cinematic discourse are analyzable with
pragmatic principles.
Various issues remain be addressed, however, if we wish to develop a more fully articulated pragmatic
approach to cinematic discourse. Here are a few:

• Multimodality: Although the subsystems of cinematic discourse discussed earlier (Section 2.2) are
standard knowledge for film scholars, further pragmatic research will be necessary to explain their
pragmatic functions in cinematic discourse. Interplay between linguistic and audiovisual features
of cinematic discourse especially raises questions about how logical and analogical information
can be dealt with together in a unified pragmatic framework. It is obvious, in any case, that spoken
dialogue and its audiovisual depiction on the screen constantly complement, modulate, and modify
each other’s effects in many ways requiring further pragmatic explanation (cf. Bateman and
Schmidt, 2012).

16
 • Contextualization. The discussion of cinematic contextualization (Section 3) implies that
inferences about cinematic events arise solely from film co-text. While this may be true to a
certain extent on a shot-to-shot basis, it is not necessarily so in longer stretches of cinematic
discourse. Approaches to cinematic contextualization should therefore consider not only the
contextualizing effects of perceptual processes in cinematic discourse but also the effects of
viewers’ knowledge of film conventions, genres, filmmakers, particular films, and so forth (cf.
Bordwell, 1985).

• Cinematic pragmatic acts. Although the importance of cinematic pragmatic acts in film
interpretation seems evident (Section 3.3), their nature and workings are not yet entirely
understood. Before the notion of pragmatic acts can be integrated into a cinematic pragmatic
theory, further work will be required describing the different filmic forms and scopes of pragmatic
acts, and beyond this, explaining how they are understood by viewers to begin with.

• Film’s deictic anchorage. The instability of the deictic locus of cinematic discourse and its
embeddedness simultaneously in different deictic fields raise a variety of pragmatic questions in
need of answering. We know, for example, that personal and spatial reference are primary
provinces of dialogue and cinematography, but we need to think more systematically about the
roles of language and editing in temporal deixis as well. Another area in need of further discussion
is interplay between linguistic and visual deixis. There are many interesting paradoxical instances
of conflicts between these in film (for example, the famous mirror scene in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi
Driver (1976) in which the taxi driver (Robert DeNiro) looks at himself in the mirror and says,
“You talkin’ to me?”).

I encourage colleagues in media pragmatics to begin thinking about cinema as a communicative process in
its own right. Were present studies of scripted discourse in cinema to be flanked by a body of
complementary studies of the depictive discourse of cinema, we could begin speaking of film pragmatics.

References:

Arijon, Daniel, 1991. Grammar of the Film Language. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press.
Banfield, Ann, 1982. Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Bateman, John A., Schmidt, Karl-Heinrich, 2012. Multimodal Film Analysis: How Films Mean.
New York: Routledge.
Baudry, Jean-Louis, 1974. Ideological effects of the basic cinematographic apparatus. Film Quarterly 28,2:
39-47.
Bednarek, Monika, 2010. The Language of Fictional Television: Drama and Identity. London: Continuum.
Berger, John, 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books.
Branigan, Edward, 1984. Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical
Film. Berlin: Mouton.
Branigan, Edward, 2006. Projecting a Camera: Language-Games in Film Theory. London: Routledge.
Bordwell, David, 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Bordwell, David, 1989. Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Buckland, Warren (ed), 1995. The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press.
Buckland, Warren, 2000. The Cognitive Semiotics of Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bühler, Karl, 1934. Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Jena: Fischer.
Carroll, Noel, 2003. Film, attention, and communication. In: Carroll, N. Engaging the Moving Image. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 10-58.
Casetti, Francesco, 1998. Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and its Spectator. Andrew, N., O’Brien, C.
(trans). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Dynel, Marta, 2011. Stranger than fiction? A few methodological notes on linguistic research in film
discourse. Brno Studies in English 37, 41-61.

17
Eisenstein, Sergei, 1942. The Film Sense. Leyda, J. (trans). New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company.
Eisenstein, Sergei, 1949. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Leyda, J. (trans). New York: Harcourt, Brace
& Company.
Emmott, Catherine, 1997. Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Estrin, Mark W. (ed), 2002. Orson Welles: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Fludernik, Monika, 2010. Towards a 'Natural' Narratology, Second Edition. London: Routledge.
Gavins, Joanna, 2007. Text World Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Giora, Rachel (ed), 1966. Cognitive Aspects of Cinematic and Visual Discourse. A Special Issue of Journal
of Pragmatics 26:6. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 713-822.
Hanks, William F., 2005. Explorations in the deictic field. Current Anthropology 46: 191-220.
James, William, 1950. Principles of Psychology. Vol 1. New York: Dover Editions.
Janney, Richard W., 2010. Film discourse cohesion. In: Hoffmann, C.R. (ed) Narrative Revisited: Telling a
Story in the Age of New Media. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 245- 265.
Long, Robert E. (ed), 2001. John Huston: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria, 2009. Television Discourse. Analysing Language in the Media. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
MacCabe, Colin, 1985. Realism and the cinema: Notes on some Brechtian themes. In: MacCabe, C.
Tracking the Signifier. Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics, Literature. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 33-57.
Mascelli, Joseph V., 1998. The Five C’s of Cinematography: Motion Picture Filming Techniques. Beverly
Hills, CA: Silman-James Press.
McGinn, Colin, 2007. The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact. New York: Vintage Books.
Metz, Christian, 1974. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mey, Jacob L., 2001. Pragmatics: An Introduction. 2nd revised edition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mey, Jacob L., 2006. Pragmatic acts. In: Brown, K. (ed) Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics. 2nd
edition. Oxford: Elsevier, 5-12.
Mey, Jacob L., 2010. Reference and the pragmeme. Journal of Pragmatics 42: 2882-2888.
O’Steen, Bobbie, 2009. The Invisible Cut. Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions.
Peters, Jan M., 1981. Pictorial Signs and the Language of Film. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Piazza, Roberta, Bednarek, Monika, Rossi, Fabio, 2011. Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the
Language of films and television series. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 1949. Film Technique and Film Acting. The Cinematic Writings of V.I.Pudovkin.
Montagu, I. (trans). New York: Bonanza Books.
Quaglio, Paulo, 2009. Television Dialogue: The Sitcom Friends vs. Natural Conversation. Amsterdam:
Benjamins.
Rabiger, Michael, 2008. Directing: Film Techniques and Aesthetics. Oxford: Focal Press.
Richardson, Kay, 2010. Television Dramatic Dialogue: A Sociolinguistic Study. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Rossi, Fabio, 2011. Discourse analysis of film dialogues: Italian comedy between linguistic realism and
pragmatic non-realism. In: Piazza, R., Bednarek, M., Rossi, F. (eds), 21-46.
Ryan, Marie-Laure, 1991. Possible Worlds: Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory. Bloomington:
University of Illinois Press.
Van Sijll, Jennifer, 2005. Cinematic Story Telling. Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions.
Vertov, Dziga, 1984. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Michelson, A (ed), O’Brien, K. (trans).
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Watzlawick, Paul, Beavin, Janet, Jackson, Don D., 1967. Pragmatics of Human Communication. A study
of interactional patterns, pathologies, and paradoxes. New York: Norton.
Werth, Paul, 1999. Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. London: Longman.

18