Open AccessIn Search of Meaning: ‘The Hours’ and Meaning Construction
Author(s) -
Gonzalo Calle Rosingana
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
círculo de lingüística aplicada a la comunicación
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.298
H-Index - 6
ISSN - 1576-4737
DOI - 10.5209/clac.65655
Subject(s) - meaning (existential) , linguistics , modality (human–computer interaction) , ideology , perspective (graphical) , unconscious mind , cognition , underspecification , psychology , common ground , modalities , sociology , situational ethics , aesthetics , epistemology , communication , social psychology , art , philosophy , computer science , social science , visual arts , psychoanalysis , artificial intelligence , law , neuroscience , politics , political science
This paper deals with the way in which certain meanings originate from the participation of a multiplicity of cues that emerge from different modalities. The analysis is based on the implementation of specific linguistic and cognitive mechanisms that trigger the generation of the audience’s unconscious construction of meaning. The corpus of the analysis concentrates on an excerpt of David Hare’s script (2002) of the movie The Hours: three women’s lives, by Stephen Daldry, that acts as the backbone of the analysis. The analysis is cross-referenced with parallel modality inputs (Kress 2009), such as specific filmic or visual details, found either in the scene or the rest of the movie. The approach of this qualitative study is mainly cognitive making special emphasis on the three types of underspecification proposed by Radden (2007a). It also draws from Langacker’s (2008) proposals related to attention and perspective to identify figure-ground relations as determinant in the molding of the characters and their ideological standpoints in the scene.