Article

Language and Literature

Multimodality and the study 19(4) 378–395

© The Author(s) 2010

of popular drama
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DOI: 10.1177/0963947010377948
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Kay Richardson
University of Liverpool, UK

Abstract
This article reviews a range of methodological issues in the study of dialogue in popular drama
(film and television). First of all it discusses some of the factors that may until recently have
acted to discourage such research, showing that there are no intractable difficulties. Secondly it
compares two recent logocentric studies of dialogue-in-film, one emerging from stylistics itself
(McIntyre, 2008) and one from film studies (Kozloff, 2000), both of which, despite a primary
focus on interactive spoken language, recognize and address the multimodal character of film
productions. Finally, it concludes that, subject to certain provisos, there is merit in approaching the
multimodality of film and TV drama productions from a methodologically logocentric perspective.

Keywords
dialogue, discourse, drama, film, methodology, multimodality, semiotics, television

This article presents an assessment of the methodological ‘state of the art’ in the stylistic
study of drama dialogue, with particular reference to popular drama and to the chal-
lenge presented by the multimodal character of such drama. Popular drama, here, is
TV drama and film, distinguished from prestige drama, encountered either as stage
performance, or as print text in education and research contexts.1 A comparison is
offered of two recent studies, McIntyre (2008) and Kozloff (2000), each of which has
recognized and sought to address weaknesses in their respective paradigms of stylis-
tics, traditionally logocentric, and film studies, traditionally videocentric. The chal-
lenge of such study is briefly explored from the overarching perspective of multimodal
semiotics (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001), and the article concludes by defending the
conditional partiality of logocentric analyses, within a broad mix of approaches open
to each other’s insights.
Popular drama has a very significant presence in the contemporary cultural world.
Raymond Williams commented on that presence in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge:

Corresponding author:
Kay Richardson, Department of Communication and Media, University of Liverpool, UK
Email: kay100@liv.ac.uk

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Richardson 379

In earlier periods drama was important at a festival, in a season, or as a conscious journey to a

theatre; from honouring Dionysus or Christ to taking in a show. What we now have is drama
as habitual experience: more in a week, in many cases, than most human beings would previ-
ously have seen in a lifetime. (Williams, 2000 [1975]: 56)

Williams perceived a distinctive culture of feeling in a society where the public expe-
rience of drama was so ordinary. In such circumstances, formal dramatization can be
appreciated as just another form of communication, offered to witnessing audiences
through performance, and yet always bracketed as hypothetical if not actually fictional –
that which could have been, or could be, under just the right imaginary conditions. Thirty
seconds of family life in a TV commercial for OXO cubes is the quintessence of what
drama came to be, in the second half of the 20th century. With the technological infra-
structures in place, the production of talk (especially naturalistic talk) as part of such
dramatization was easy, and as consumers of drama on radio, television and film as well
as in the theatre, we now expect to hear such talk unless the specific generic form
excludes it (though our expectations are not always satisfied).
The mediascapes of the early 1970s that Williams was familiar with are very different
from those of the 2010s nationally and globally, thanks to the rise of multichannel televi-
sion and of the internet, and the complex effects of this on media economics. In Britain,
attrition of advertising revenue and the expanding demands on the licence fee have
restricted the space for new home-grown TV drama, whilst new feature film production
declined in the recession towards the end of the opening decade of the 21st century
(House of Lords, 2010). In America, studio and independent movie production, as well
as TV drama have remained strong, though seriously affected towards the end of the
decade by the credit crunch, the writers’ strike of 2007/2008 and the recession. American
TV drama even experienced significant expansion in quantity and improvement in per-
ceived quality through the niche marketed (and less regulated) pay-cable networks
(McCabe and Akass, 2007; Nelson, 2007). Television dramas can now, like movies, pro-
long their appeal beyond their first release dates through effective marketing strategies
and digital technologies. So, although the place of popular public drama in contemporary
mediascapes is different from what it was in 1974, Williams’ central point is still rele-
vant. Yet most textual studies of popular drama in media and film studies which engage
with social meaning, such as the TV drama research of Robin Nelson or the film research
of Julia Hallam, does so through a focus on theme, narrative and characterization, ignor-
ing the role of dialogue. Stylistics is well placed to fill this gap and help explain the
contribution of the dialogue to the ‘dramatized society’ matrix. Why has it been reluctant
to take up this opportunity?

1 The space for popular drama in stylistics

Within stylistics, the relative neglect of drama in general has been frequently commented
on over the years (Burton, 1980; Culpeper et al., 1998; Hall, 1999, 2002; Culpeper and
McIntyre, 2006; Mandala, 2007b; Stockwell, 2008 celebrates a small resurgence of
drama stylistics). Despite this neglect, popular drama has provided a resource for a sig-
nificant number of studies, in a variety of linguistically informed subdisciplinary contexts

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380 Language and Literature 19(4)

including but not restricted to stylistic approaches. In order of publication, these include
Tannen and Lakoff (1984), Harwood and Giles (1992), Simpson and Montgomery
(1995), Culpeper (1998), Short (1998), Simpson (1998), Harwood (2000), Culpeper
(2001), Rey (2001), Marriott (2002), Vandael (2002), Cowper (2003), Coupland (2004),
McIntyre (2004), Bubel (2005), Tagliamonte and Roberts (2005), Bubel and Spitz
(2006), Piazza (2006), Richardson (2006), Snell (2006), Bleichenbacher (2007), Mandala
(2007a), Short (2007), Bubel (2008), Brône (2008), Lee (2008), Bleichenbacher (2008a,
2008b), Petrucci (2008), Quaglio (2009), Piazza (2010), Richardson (2010).2
There are also some contributions from beyond linguistics worth noting in respect of
their focus or approach. Fine (1981) does not make use of any linguistic research, but
writes about dialogue in 1970s’ American daytime soaps. Mittel (2007) does not need
linguistic tools for his narratalogical analyses of The Wizard of Oz (MGM 1939) and Lost
(ABC 2004) but is an important reference for any attempt to develop interdisciplinary
approaches.3 Lury’s (2007) interpretation of CSI (CBS 2000) is valuable at the interface
of dialogue and sound design.
The list itself indicates that there was little attention until circa 1998: this coincides
with the era when broadcast television channel abundance converged with digitization
and the spread of the internet, making popular drama very accessible in permanent form –
dangerously so, from the perspective of the economic interests of the producers. Beyond
the fact that each study refers to one or more popular drama, it is not a unified field: it
lacks any specific construction of ‘popular drama’ as a distinct object of stylistic study.
It includes not only full-scale analyses, but also some more tangential accounts illustrat-
ing specific points: Culpeper (2001) analyses a scene from One Foot in the Grave, (BBC
1990) demonstrating from a cognitive stylistics perspective the application of schema
theory to characterization in TV comedy. Some studies make use of popular drama data
more for the sake of theoretical development than out of substantive interest in the texts
or genres themselves: Bubel (2008) uses Secrets and Lies (Channel 4 Films 1996) to
develop some points about the participation framework of film. Some use popular drama
materials as a surrogate for comparable talk in the ‘real world’: Tannen and Lakoff
(1984) tackle couples’ talk; Coupland (2004) looks at stylization. Some pursue a ‘word
to screen’ approach: Simpson and Montgomery (1995) write about the visual ‘narration’
of the film Cal (Enigma Productions 1984) through shot sequences, so as to compare this
with the original novel. Short’s (1998) work on Fawlty Towers (BBC 1975) is from the
mainstream of stylistics, aiming to demonstrate the self-sufficiency of scripts (see
Section 3.1 later in this article), whilst the work of Harwood and Giles (1992) on humour
in The Golden Girls (Touchstone Television/NBC 1985) has a more social-scientific
agenda: their demonstration that the humorous dialogue of this series cues audiences to
laugh at older women behaving in age-inappropriate ways is undertaken in order to argue
that ‘effects’ arguments about ageism in the media need to understand the specific forms
by which the media teaches younger people to think about older ones. Bleichenbacher is
interested in how mainstream films can become mono- or multilingual, and the causes
and consequences of the various choices made in this respect.
Popular drama dialogue ought to be accessible to stylistics, in virtue of its preference
for naturalistic speech.4 The publication of Burton (1980) launched a way of pursuing
drama stylistics that has since become a major recommended approach. ‘Discourse stylistics’

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Richardson 381

(see Simpson and Hall, 2002), as an approach interested in textual organization and
patterning above the clause, usually with reference to the social relations constructed in
and through the dialogue, is particularly appropriate for the study of drama, where speech
exchange is foregrounded, and especially for its naturalistic modes.

2  Constraints on the stylistic study of popular drama

2.1  Script or performance/production?
In 1981 Mick Short argued, (whilst allowing for the study of performance/production as
a complementary enterprise), that playscripts were the proper object of study in drama
criticism:

It has become a commonplace of dramatic criticism over the past ten years or so to suggest that
the only adequate analysis of drama must be the analysis of performance. In the first part of
this paper I argue that this view is incorrect and that critics should concentrate on dramatic
texts. (Short, 1981: 180)

Short’s challenge to drama critics like Styan (1969), who believed that drama pro-
ductions were the only sound basis of criticism, was further developed in Short (1998),
where he argued that scripts are stable, whilst productions are unstable, varying even
from one night’s performance to the next, making them unsuitable for valid critical
discourse. The converse is true of popular drama: productions are fixed, whilst scripts
are unstable. Regarded as works-in-progress, screenplays typically do not command
the same respect during production processes as playscripts (especially playscripts
penned by authors of reputation). Different kinds of script are generated during the
course of these processes for the use of different participants; distinctions are made
between screenplays, shooting scripts, lined scripts, and continuity scripts; actors will
annotate their personal copies. Lines may be changed on the fly during rehearsal and
filming; only certain copies of the ‘original’ scripts will show those changes, at best.
‘The script’ takes on a very uncertain, unstable character by comparison with the final-
ized production, even before taking into account non-prototypical ‘scripting’ pro-
cesses, as with Mike Leigh’s rehearsal improvisation methods.5
Film and TV drama scripts are not in the public domain to the same extent as play-
scripts, which have been more likely to achieve commercial publication. The lower
status of screenwriters compared with directors in the film business is well known and
their intellectual property rights in general are not as strong as those of writers who
produce work for the stage. Screenplays have not been recognized as works of art in
their own right, separate from the productions to which they contribute (Maras, 2009).
As a result, there is little ‘data’, in the discipline’s officially preferred mode, for stylis-
ticians to work with. Instead, the dialogue component of the production is transcribed
from analogue or digital copies of productions, just as naturally occurring ‘broadcast
talk’ is transcribed (Scannell, 1991; Hutchby, 2005; Tolson, 2005). Broadcast talk, in
interviews, chat shows and audience vox pops, has an important part to play in respect
of particular communicative relationships that television and radio have with their

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382 Language and Literature 19(4)

audiences. Because of television and radio’s character as domestic media, those

relationships are quite different from those of either the cinema or the stage, despite
the fact that drama can be featured in any one of these four media, and despite the fact
that TV can ‘channel’ the stage and the big screen to some extent.6 Transcriptions are
not the same as scripts, as they do not reproduce the original stage directions. Yet, in
respect of the ‘wording’, transcripts should be closer to productions than original
scripts are, and have the potential to be prosodically faithful too. Stylisticians in prac-
tice are not methodological purists: Simpson (1998) bases his analysis of a Monty
Python (BBC 1969) sketch not on a script, but on a transcript found on a greeting card,
together with a video copy of the original production. The transcription of dialogue
from completed productions requires the transcriber to confront the question of just
what it is that can or should be ‘transcribed’ (cf. Kress, 2000: 27–9, on the related issue
of what can be ‘spelled’ in writing). The stylistician accustomed to working with writ-
ten texts may want to settle for ‘just the words’, as if the transcription was a (recon-
structed) script. The linguist trained to deal with speech is bound to point out that this
does not do justice to such prosodic properties as the rhythm and intonation of the
delivery, as well as volume and voice quality (see Van Leeuwen, 1999, on the semiot-
ics of sound). ‘Just the words’ then seems like a denial of multimodality, and an uncer-
tainty as to where language ends and other semiotic systems begin.
Popular drama productions are not made of words alone, so to take them seriously is
to be willing to go beyond linguistic analysis. But scripts are also multimodal. Like all
written texts, they have properties of layout and graphology governed by visual not lin-
guistic conventions.7 So ‘disciplined’ are the conventions for the presentation of screen-
plays that they are programmed into software packages such as Final Draft™ helping to
ensure that writers do not deviate from the preferred form. Millard (2010) whose main
point is to draw attention to just how conservative the mainstream industry still is in this
respect, even down to its insistence on a particular font and font size (Courier 12-point),
nevertheless discusses some imaginative recent trends on the fringes of screenwriting,
such as the use of different fonts for different characters.
The multimodality of screen drama has always been apparent in film studies, though
not under this description. Bordwell and Thompson’s (2009) Film Art has been serving
as an introduction to film analysis since the 1979 first edition. The pro-filmic mise-en-
scène provides a framing space which actors move through; the filmed record of what
they do there is manipulated in post-production editing whilst the soundtrack contributes
not only verbally and prosodically meaningful utterances in oral mode but also non-
linguistic vocality: laughter (Smith, 2008: 15) screaming, exhaling, crying, moaning
(e.g. Meg Ryan’s ‘orgasm’ in When Harry Met Sally, Columbia Pictures/Castle Rock
1989), sound effects and appropriate diegetic and extradiegetic music.
Since 1998 there have been some changes and some continuities. Scholars of prestige
drama still make the case for script-based analysis (Culpeper and McIntyre, 2006;
Mandala, 2007b). But such studies now are more apt to recognize the specific character-
istics of the written text, such as its stage directions (Feng and Shen, 2001) its punctua-
tion, (Ivanchenko, 2007), its spelling (Culpeper and McIntyre, 2006), and there are
complementary moves in the direction of multimodal analysis of performance and pro-
duction (McIntyre, 2008. See Swann, 2006, and section 3 of this article).

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Richardson 383

2.2  Poverty of data?

The failure to develop a stylistics of popular drama may also reflect a fear that the material
itself is unlikely to offer the stylistician enough of a challenge in trying to characterize its
forms, functions and possible effects. But this is to ignore the range of ways in which
dialogue can be linguistically interesting. The basis of interest may be formal/aesthetic
(see Herman, 1998 on the manipulation of turntaking possibilities to display character
traits) or it may be sociocultural (see Harwood and Giles, 1992, on ageism in TV dramatic
dialogue). Sociocultural judgment can be negative, as it is for Harwood and Giles, or more
positive, as in Richardson’s (2006) account of how metasemiotic mechanisms in The West
Wing (NBC 1999) are used to enhance the public image of political spin doctors. Interest
is in the eyes and ears of the beholder, whose job it then becomes to convey the reasons
for that interest to a wider audience in terms of these possibilities and others.
As indicated earlier, researchers have already found both sociocultural and formal
interest in a range of different productions. The playful use of language in comedies has
attracted attention (Quaglio, 2009 is the most recent) but ‘serious’ film and TV drama has
not been neglected (Richardson, 2010 for TV, Piazza, 2010 for film). Whilst it is possible
that a degree of consistency within genres will make fresh analysis of specific examples
victim of the law of diminishing returns, stylistics can strive to keep in touch with inno-
vation in film-making and TV drama production.
It also works against the study of dialogue in popular drama that comparisons of sponta-
neous talk with constructed dialogue in fiction and drama traditionally represents the former
as ‘messy’ and the latter as ‘tidied-up’. Page wrote: ‘... it seems probable that the whole
concept of realism as applied to fictional speech is often based on an inadequate or inaccu-
rate notion of what spontaneous speech is really like’ (Page, 1973: 4). In 2010 there is no
excuse for relying on inadequate and inaccurate ideas about spontaneous speech, in the light
of the extensive research which has taken place in the analysis of spoken interaction since
Page’s comment was made (see, e.g. Cameron, 2001; Fitch and Sanders, 2004; Firth, 2010).
But this perspective sets drama dialogue up as the poor relation of genuinely interac-
tive speech. The apparent messiness of the latter, as we now know, is really only the
surface appearance of complex processes of moment-to-moment negotiation of sense,
identity and relationship: if the signs of such negotiation are eliminated in drama, surely
this makes the dialogue ‘thinner’? Even within the study of broadcasting, dialogue in TV
drama may seem to be the poor relation of ‘broadcast talk’ (Scannell, 1991; Tolson,
2005), which, though performed to a witnessing audience, shares its emergent dynamics
with unmediated talk.
In answer to the ‘poor relation’ challenge, a starting point might be to observe that
although dramatic dialogue is ‘less than’ its unscripted, spontaneous counterpart, it is
also ‘more than’ unscripted talk. It is, for valid dramatological reasons, more limited in
the ways I have described, but it also has to carry burdens in relation to the larger discur-
sive context that are not applicable to spontaneous talk. The narrational aspects of that
context are of particular importance (Section 3 of this article).
Dialogue in popular drama may have been neglected because screen drama is regarded
as a mode where visual, not linguistic, semiosis is dominant, in a storytelling mode designed
to show action and event. Stories, which are not essentially linguistic constructs (Chatman,

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384 Language and Literature 19(4)

1978: vii; but see also Herman, 2004; Ryan, 2007) organize events/actions for viewers to
watch. Yet each of these three non-linguistic characteristics (the story, the action, the visual
experience), may require some kind of accommodation with linguistic expression.
In drama, mimetic ‘storying’ accommodates language by introducing some diegetic nar-
rating of story events (McIntyre, 2006. See also Jahn, 2001). Such narrational discourse can
be independent of shown events: a verbal voice-over, or written titles, but even where the
only perceptible language is spoken character dialogue intrinsic to the ‘unfolding’ events,
there will be times when narrative information is discernible from some of that dialogue.
This narrative information is for the benefit of the audience, not the other character(s) but
designed-in as a purposed by-product of the characters’ interactional business.
The locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary properties of language-as-speech
are entirely consonant with action perspectives. Speech is action, in itself, and also func-
tions in relation to the wider events into which it is placed:

Although the purely verbal aspects of dramatic dialogue have generated much interest in the
analysis of drama, the genre is basically an actional one, as has been noted from Aristotle
onwards in the Western tradition. The verbal dimension, although important in its own right,
does not stand in isolation but contributes to and participates in the construction of the dramatic
action. It is shaped in particular ways to do so, which the dialogic form, as drama’s major mode
of discourse, enables it to do. (Herman, 1995: 92)

As for the visuality of screen drama, the point here would be that its meaningfulness is
not always self-sufficient. Verbal expression is often necessary in order for audiences to
identify what it is they are looking at – in the absence of iconic visual signifiers such as
Tower Bridge or the Statue of Liberty.
The next section of this article looks at moves of rapprochement between linguistic
research looking to recognize the non-linguistic aspects of screen drama; film research
looking to accommodate the role of language; and social semiotic research looking to
establish a common frame of reference across all semiotic modes and media.

3  Multimodality: ‘It’s stylistics, Jim, but not as we know it’

The subheading for this section is clichéd, but it is apt for the context. The existence of
multimodal texts is an indisputable fact of contemporary sociocultural life. Traditional
disciplinary fields such as stylistics and film studies are offering ‘bottom-up’ responses
to the challenge of the multimodal, depending on their own particular intellectual heri-
tage, whilst other researchers are attempting to introduce ‘top-down’ conceptual and
analytical tools appropriate for the multimodal mediascape. This section draws on work
of both kinds, relevant to the study of popular drama, taking stock of the state of the art
for the sake of future progress.

3.1  Dialogue and multimodality:The view from stylistics

McIntyre’s 2008 article is a notable recent attempt to extend drama stylistics so as to
address the multimodality of dramatic performance/production. McIntyre argues that:

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Richardson 385

the multimodal elements of the production [a film version of Richard III, Bayley/Paré
Productions/British Screen/First Look International/United Artists, 1995] contribute to our
interpretation of the play as much as the linguistic elements of the dramatic text (McIntyre,
2008: 309).

The relevance of this as a research claim lies in the history of stylistics, specifically with
Mick Short’s (1998) influential position that written texts commanded production to a
very large extent. The production merely ‘realized’ in other modes (e.g. through staging
and vocal delivery) what was always anticipated in the verbal properties of the script:

I hope to have demonstrated that if you pay close attention to the linguistic form of (parts
of) dramatic texts you can infer a huge amount of information about an appropriate way to
perform them. This comes about because we carry with us a large amount of information
about how to interpret utterances, and hence how they will be said, what gestures and actions
will be appropriate, and so on. Not everything is predictable, and there is plenty of room for
the director and actor to make their contributions to performance. But the range of appropri-
ate behaviour is considerably more restricted than many critics would have us believe.
(Short, 1998: 16)

In this argumentative context, McIntyre’s argument cannot be that the Richard III film
communicates visually as well as verbally; he needs to establish the stronger point that
the interpretation depends on design decisions that were not dictated by the script.8 This
he does, convincingly, in his analysis of the opening soliloquy in the play. There is a
particular passage in that soliloquy which McIntyre interprets as a face-threatening act
by Richard to the audience. The passage is:

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,

To entertain these fair well-spoken days
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasure of these days.

There is nothing intrinsically face threatening in the lines themselves. They become
interpretable as a threat to the viewers’ negative face because the actor, Ian McKellen,
alone in the room, pronounces the words facing directly into the camera and walking
towards it, whilst the camera retreats backwards, seemingly in response.
When McIntyre introduces his analysis of the soliloquy scene, he writes:

I analyse the soliloquy scene from Ian McKellen’s Richard III (1995), taking account of both
the linguistic and non-linguistic factors involved in its interpretation. (McIntyre, 2008: 317)

This division of the scene’s semiosis into linguistic and non-linguistic factors is a
taxonomic move which recognizes the multisemiotic character of the text, but does so
from a logocentric perspective on how the film’s meaning is designed/interpreted. A
cinematographer might, with equal justification, develop a videocentric approach, ‘tak-
ing account of the photographic and non-photographic factors involved in the film’s

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386 Language and Literature 19(4)

interpretation’, and both could claim to be multimodal accounts. McIntyre’s logocentricity

is unsurprising – stylistics is a traditionally verbal discipline, and Richard III is originally
a play by William Shakespeare, not a movie by a famous Hollywood director. From the
perspective of film production, logocentricity of the kind represented by McIntyre is
actually more defensible than the cinematographer’s videocentricity, since the script,
with its written characterization of what actors will, at a later stage, be heard to speak,
prototypically precedes anything that the cinematographer may contribute; thus the
script’s influence on the cinematography is greater than the cinematography’s influence
on the script. Further work, with a greater range of texts, will be necessary in order to
establish how far we can travel to a multimodal destination on a logocentric ticket.

3.2  Dialogue and multimodality from the bottom up:

The view from film studies
Meanwhile, in film studies, a discipline with a videocentric intellectual heritage and
logophobic tendencies (Kozloff, 2000: chapter 1), there has been a comparable extension
of analytic perspective. The logophobia of film studies is reactive: to avoid being a poor
relation of theatre, cinema needed to establish its own aesthetic credentials on very dif-
ferent terms. It very successfully did exactly that, starting with Eisenstein and the early
Soviet filmmakers in the era of the silent cinema, when dialogue could occasionally be
read on intertitles but never heard. There is now a recognition that the logophobia was an
over-reaction: with the status of film as an art form thoroughly secured, the discipline can
admit that language-as-speech does contribute to the medium’s aesthetic effectiveness.
So strong had been the exclusion of speech from film analysis that its reintroduction, in
Kozloff (2000), required a remedial approach which initially appears to be every bit as
logocentric as McIntyre’s:

So little serious work has been done on the subject [of film dialogue] that we do not yet have
the tools for determining why one instance of dialogue is brilliantly successful and another
leaden-footed. This study is meant to help us make aesthetic evaluations based on informed
analysis. (Kozloff, 2000: 29)9

A closer reading reveals a more complex articulation. The study does put dialogue
front and centre, but only in relation to narrative cinema, introducing an informal tax-
onomy of dialogue functions based on the principle of narrative and non-narrative mean-
ings invested in dialogue. This approach is sensible, from a film studies perspective,
because there is a lot that can be said about the functions of dialogue without needing to
invoke any specific linguistic apparatus. It is also theoretically well grounded, because it
acknowledges the primacy of overall textual design (narrative structure) as the initial
basis for an understanding of textual semiosis, including dialogue. On this basis, Kozloff
recognizes nine overall distinct functions for dialogue in film, and divides these into two
groups. The first group comprises six that are fundamental, ‘because they are centrally
involved in the communication of the narrative’ (2000: 33). These six functions are:
anchorage of the diegesis and characters; communication of narrative causality; enact-
ment of narrative events; character revelation; adherence to the code of realism; control

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Richardson 387

of viewer evaluation and emotions. The second group comprises three optional functions,
which ‘go beyond narrative communication into the realms of aesthetic effect, ideologi-
cal persuasion and commercial appeal’ (2000: 33). These three are: exploitation of the
resources of language; thematic messages/authorial commentary/allegory; opportunities
for star turns (2000: 33).
It is important to say that dialogue is not the only filmic resource for meeting these
narrative and non-narrative representational, expressive and communicational objec-
tives; even ‘exploitation of the resources of language’ might take place elsewhere than in
the dialogue (in the lyrics of an extradiegetic sound track, for example, as in the opening
sequence of The Sopranos, HBO 1999) but it is a significant resource for these purposes,
and the resource which required attention because of its prior neglect.
Under Kozloff’s approach, the analyst’s assessment regarding which bits of dialogue
are performing which functions is guided by his/her overall interpretation of the expres-
sive artefact or event, (which could be any mimetic narrative: there is no a priori reason
why only film dialogue can be approached in this way) recognizing (a) that multifunc-
tional utterances are the norm and (b) that narrative meaning is distributed across textual
resources. It could be argued that ‘adherence to the code of realism’ really belongs in the
second rather than the first group, given that, theoretically speaking, degrees of ‘realism’
relate more to representation than to narrative as such, since non-narrative representa-
tional texts can also be judged on their realism. Such detailed criticism of the approach
is beyond the scope of the present article, which will now present a more explicit com-
parison between the Kozloff and McIntyre studies.

3.3  Film studies and stylistics: Further comparisons

In the following discussion, the emphasis on Kozloff is somewhat greater than that on
McIntyre since the former is likely to be less familiar to the readers of this journal, not
because the latter is any less valuable for the study of multimodal dramatic productions.
McIntyre is right that film studies has barely engaged with the linguistic elements of
drama let alone its interrelation of dialogue with other elements of its larger multimodal
context (2008: 312), though he overlooks Kozloff’s work, which attempts both of these
tasks. He is also right on his other two points, differences of methodology and of agenda,
in ways that deserve some attention. I will consider these two later points (in reverse
order) not in relation to film studies in general as McIntyre does, but specifically in rela-
tion to Kozloff’s approach.
Neither McIntyre nor Kozloff believe in the self-sufficiency of the script as the basis
of filmic meaning. Their ways of expressing this are indicative of the different disciplin-
ary agendas that McIntyre refers to. Where Kozloff says ‘words in a script become trans-
figured when they are spoken by an actor, filmed by the camera, edited together,
underscored with music’ (2000: 90), McIntyre writes: ‘a solely text-based stylistic analy-
sis does not reveal the variety of interpretative effects that arise from watching the film
version of the play’ (2008: 320). Kozloff orients to the process of textual production,
from script through to film: her ‘Integration’ chapter relates dialogue successively to
performance, shot content and scale, editing, and sound design. McIntyre orients to the
audience’s experience and/or his own experience of the film, and the analyst’s responsibility

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388 Language and Literature 19(4)

to that experience. Beyond this, Kozloff’s phrasing seems more (positively) evaluative
than McIntyre’s. Not all of film studies is in the evaluation business, nor is stylistics
hostile to evaluation (Piazza, 2010, writes evaluatively about Antonioni films), and not
all of film studies evaluations are oriented to aesthetic judgment. Evaluation can also be
ideological, with or without a psychoanalytic dimension. But aesthetic evaluation has
certainly been important in its disciplinary constitution.
Kozloff’s ‘Integration’ chapter ends with a comparison of two equivalent scenes,
from two different Second World War films, both deploying dialogue for thematic pur-
pose (to persuade the audience that the war is worth fighting), both using a long speech
(cf. Richard’s soliloquy in McIntyre’s article) positioned right at the end of the movie.
Kozloff argues that the speech in one of these scenes is well written and well integrated
(Mrs Miniver, Loews/MGM 1942), whilst in the other, the text is weaker and so is the
integration (So Proudly We Hail! Paramount 1943). The old problem of whether aes-
thetic judgements are really matters of taste and personal preference is lurking here.
Kozloff writes: ‘While the visual background and art direction of So Proudly are nonde-
script, the mise-en-scène of the church amplifies the force of the vicar’s words [in
Miniver]’ (Kozloff, 2000: 133). It is certainly true that there is a mutual relevance in the
visual and the verbal tracks in Miniver, which is absent in So Proudly; whether or not that
mutual relevance makes the former ‘better’ is a more subjective issue.
The methodological differences between film studies and stylistics/sociolinguistics
that McIntyre refers to are also apparent in a comparison of their two approaches.
McIntyre says that:

Most analyses undertaken by film critics are macro-level analyses of issues pertaining to the
film as a whole (e.g., narrative structure, the representation of particular ideologies) or are
micro-analyses of specific frames of film’ (McIntyre, 2008: 312).

The Miniver/So Proudly analyses belong in the second of these two categories, but with
reference out to the former, since the speeches are both treated as ‘coda/evaluation’ con-
tributions (in Labov and Waletzky’s [1967] sense) in virtue of their placement, and also
as having ideological content. Yet they are ‘analyses’ that might be rejected under that
description from certain positions, not so much because they are evaluative as well as
analytic, but also because they are presented discursively – closer to what ethnographers
recognize as ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973) than to formal textual analysis as such.
This contrasts with McIntyre’s multimodal scene transcription in tabular form, with six
separate columns for different formal aspects of the production (time of shot; shot descrip-
tion; linguistic audio; paralinguistic visual; paralinguistic audio; non-linguistic visual).
The thick description approach leaves readers anxious that they are not privy to ‘every-
thing’ that might be relevant to interpretation, only to the things that Kozloff chooses to
articulate, discursively weaving together description and interpretation. Kozloff does pro-
vide a full transcription of the speeches she discusses, but these transcriptions are free-
standing. McIntyre’s is inserted into his table. The tabular approach creates an impression
of completeness, allowing readers to examine the data themselves. Yet the presentation
transforms that data into graphic and orthographic form, and the impression of completeness
is misleading. There are no indications of vocal quality and prosody.10

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Richardson 389

The microanalysis of a single scene is sufficient grounding for McIntyre’s main theo-
retical point about the importance of multimodal analysis of production in place of the
monomodal analysis of written texts; and microanalysis is also sufficient for Kozloff’s
point that:

The type of dialogue that so many critics have scorned the most – a very long speech, marked
by formal/artistic language, that explicitly tries to ‘send a message’ – can be brilliantly effec-
tive, depending upon the way in which it is integrated into the text. (Kozloff, 2000: 134)

But the ‘Integration’ chapter covers more ground than this. The earlier part of the chapter
is an attempt at a synoptic overview of possible interactions between ‘text’ (words) and
‘context’, where the ‘context’ is not the mode of narrative, since that has already been
addressed elsewhere, but the submodes of practical film design. In this part of the chapter
there is neither thick description nor tabulated detail, but instead a series of points sup-
ported by illustrative examples. In some areas this overview is organized by reference to
‘open set’ possibilities, as for instance, when Kozloff discusses the possible vocal quali-
ties that actors can bring to their performances. In other areas the discussion indicates a
closed class of options. When considering how speech and shot should relate, the main
choice is between synchronous or asynchronous speech (seeing the speaker or not seeing
them). Asynchronous speech can feature images focusing on the hearer (reaction shots)
or on what they are talking about (cutaways). The subject of cutaways can be proximate
or remote in time/space, or even imaginary. A final possibility is of pairing speech with
images unrelated to speaker, hearer or subject matter.
What McIntyre contributes that Kozloff does not is the kind of microanalytic insight
that comes from applying particular sociolinguistic theories in the analysis. By describ-
ing certain lines of the Richard III soliloquy as a face-threatening act, McIntyre provi-
sionally ‘buys into’ politeness theory, acknowledging Brown and Levinson (1987) as his
key reference. The Brown and Levinson account of politeness has been contested and
developed (see e.g. Mills, 2003), but such complication need not invalidate applied
research, so long as the original account is still part of the theoretical repertoire.
In this survey I have shown that there is agreement across two different but related intel-
lectual traditions that films are made out of more than one communicative resource, and a
desire to understand how this works. However, each approach has both strengths and weak-
nesses and there are some quite significant epistemological differences that stand in the
way of simply combining them. Although there are some accounts of multimodal discourse
that are not tied to particular traditions in this way, these can only be of partial use as
regards methodology because of their necessary generality. A case in point is the social
semiotic framework introduced by Kress and van Leeuwen (2001), to which we now turn.

3.4  Dialogue and multimodality from the top down:  The view from social
semiotics
One of the best-known attempts to develop a flexible social semiotics to underpin the
analysis of multimodal texts is that of Kress and van Leeuwen (2001). Kress and van
Leeuwen recognize a distinction between ‘medium’ (the material resources used for

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390 Language and Literature 19(4)

the production and distribution of texts) and ‘mode’ (the abstract ‘grammars’ which
inform textual design). An account of the nature of ‘film’ in their terms is complex.
Since the first commercial ‘talkies’ of the late 1920s, ‘film’ has been a compound
medium based on the (re)production of sound as well as of moving images. Film texts
in this sense are multimedial, even when the same material artefact (celluloid strips
with sprocket holes) is used for both the video and the audio recording: these two
processes leave quite distinct traces on the film stock, synchronized together. Film
texts are also multimodal: narrative is one of the modes prototypically associated with
film; language-as-speech is another; editing is a third, and so on, none of these modes
being intrinsic qualities of the media in themselves. Kress and van Leeuwen allow for
the possibility of media becoming ‘grammaticized’ and turning into modes; arguably
film as a whole has undergone this change, in its development of formalized conven-
tions for using a particular combination of other modes and media in specific ways,
resulting in the kind of narrative cinema that we are so familiar with. The material
production and distribution of film are separate processes, and both stages require
semiotic work. In current economic, industrial and technological conditions, movie-
making now increasingly anticipates cross-platform delivery (in cinemas, on televi-
sion, on DVD and online) – this has been called ‘convergence’. The modalization of
film facilitates convergence: it allows contemporary ‘moving image’ stories (the tex-
tual artefacts themselves) to be produced, and older ones to be reproduced, using, in
whole or in part, the new digital equivalent to the analogue medium of film stock. The
generality of Kress and van Leeuwen’s approach means that this is as far as their
apparatus is able to take us.

4  Conclusions
Films and TV dramas are indeed multimodal texts. Narrative cinema is a mode in its
own right, but a complex one which exploits other modes, such as dialogue, that are
not unique to cinema. The complexity of the articulations in particular textual instances
will always prohibit formal analysis of any given movie in its totality, whatever that
might mean, and there is no specific apparatus currently fit for purpose. Multimodal
semiotics is too general; traditional stylistics too linguistic and traditional film studies
too narratalogical/visual. Neither Kozloff nor McIntyre achieve a comprehensive anal-
ysis of the scenes they discuss, let alone the movies in which those scenes appear. Even
when these writers attempt to address the multimodality of the phenomenon, they carry
with them the baggage of disciplinary inheritances. Therefore, in the future as in the
past, there will be limitations on what any particular analysis sets out to examine. This
argues for a non-essentialist figure-and-ground way of working with multimodal texts
such as films. In this context there is no need to apologize for adopting a logocentric
approach, just so long as (a) there remains space for approaches oriented to other
aspects of production and scope for collaboration between practitioners of different
approaches, and (b) controls are built into analytic protocols so as to ensure proper
attention to the interaction of figure and ground. One such control is represented by
Kozloff’s narratalogical perspective, because this shows respect for the mode of the
production’s overall textual design.

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Richardson 391

So much for ‘how’, what about ‘why’? In a dramatized society, the reciprocal rela-
tions between producers and audiences of popular drama are an important part of the
cultural matrix. Logocentric studies of such productions should be able to offer some
insight into that matrix from one particular perspective, using different kinds of linguistic
expertise depending on the specific focus of the study, and thereby aligning the study of
dialogue in popular drama with the sociocultural as well as the formal and cognitive
goals of stylistics.

Notes
  1 The crudity of this categorization scheme facilitates condensed presentation of the core
arguments. Whilst television and film in general are ‘popular’ and theatrical drama in general
is ‘prestigious’, there are also hierarchies within media (some television drama is more
prestigious than others), there are cult tastes in all media which indicate a certain quality
of popularity rather than a quantitative measure of audience size, and there are more or less
prototypical instances of productions in each medium.
  2 The Anglo-American bias in this list reflects my own limitations in searching for non-
Anglophone contributions, the intertextual biases of the research literature(s) and the
international marketing of Anglophone film and television. Piazza (2010) indicates a number
of studies by Italian researchers, in addition to her own work. Readers interested in further
challenging this hegemony might start from Burger’s extensive bibliography on the use of
feature films for foreign language teaching (Burger, 2010).
  3 Here and throughout I have specified for each production the main production company and
date of first release, and for TV programmes the channel on which they were first broadcast if
this is different from the production company.
  4 Davis (2008) offers a sketch of the major forms of dialogue in drama, distinguishing between
‘naturalism’ in contrast with ‘extreme naturalism’ (e.g. The Royle Family, Granada Television/
BBC 1998); ‘selective naturalism’ (e.g. The Bill, Thames Television/ITV 1984 – probably the
default category in TV and film); ‘heightened naturalism’ (e.g. the work of Alan Bleasdale – GBH,
Channel 4 1991; Boys from the Blackstuff, BBC 1982) and ‘non-naturalism’, where characters are
not only speaking for themselves but the dramatist’s own voice is audibly present too: there is a
reflexive awareness of the framing context within the speech of one or more of the characters.
Davis recognizes that non-naturalism is likely to be rare in popular media. Whilst useful as a
starting point, and with a justifiable case for using the term ‘naturalism’ rather than ‘realism’,
Davis’ position on the relations between naturally-occurring talk and its dramatized surrogate is
less subtle than that of either Burton (1980) or Herman (1995). In fairness to Davis, the book is
intended more as a practical guide for would-be writers than as a contribution to academic debate.
  5 The fixity of the text’s meaning is of course a different and much more problematic issue, itself
an important subject in literary, linguistic and media research.
  6 Not everything that goes out via TV is made-for-TV. The medium can also be used more like
a channel, relaying stage productions and movies made for the cinema. Some modification is
required (e.g. the pan-and-scan technique for accommodating widescreen images in the era of
the 4:3 TV screen ratio) but the medium’s own aesthetic affordances are not exploited in the
creation of the art performance.
  7 Script readers have to be able to discriminate easily between the component parts of the text. They
expect the name of the speaking character always to be centred, alone, in the middle of the line;

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392 Language and Literature 19(4)

they expect any stage directions (which may be delivery indicators such as ‘whispers’; ‘shouting’;
‘hoarsely’, etc.) to follow on the next line, also centred, and for the dialogue lines to follow this.
  8 Short says in this quotation that ‘not everything is predictable’, and McIntyre agrees, with
his soliloquy analysis by way of evidence. It is the willingness to engage with the non-
predictable which is explicit and new in 2008. In 1998 Short was ‘talking down’ performance
and production so that it could be safely ignored; in 2008, McIntyre started to explore ways of
introducing it into textual analysis.
  9 Kozloff’s commitment to textual evaluation is indicative of film studies’ Arts heritage. Her
recommendation of a functionalist approach to analysis signals the possibility of evaluation
on the common ground shared between textual criticism as a scholarly enterprise and craft
perspectives within the industry on what does and does not work at a practical-textual level.
See also section 3.3 of this article.
10 Kozloff mentions prosodic aspects of delivery and voice qualities in her account of the two
war film scenes and also as part of her general overview of how dialogue interacts with other
signifying systems (performance, in this case).

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Address
Kay Richardson, Department of Communication and Media, Roxby Building, University
of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 7ZT. [email: kay100@liv.ac.uk]

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