Parameters of pragmatic analysis of phraseology in multimodal discourse (the case study of feature films)

The article is devoted to the pragmaphraseological analysis of cinematic discourse. The cinematic discourse mirrors typical patterns of modern oral communication that underwent artistic processing through the means of cinema as a special form of art. The research aims to develop a parametric approach to the pragmatic study of phraseological units in films, which can provide a comprehensive assessment of their pragmatic potential, taking into account the multimodal nature of cinematic discourse and its belonging to artistic communication. The study is interdisciplinary. It applies a number of basic concepts and modern theories from the fields of linguopragmatics, phraseology, corpus linguistics, conceptual modeling of film poetics, and multimodal discourse-analysis. The source of phraseological material is two Russian-language feature films selected from the Multimedia Film Corpus created by the author. The approach elaborated in the present paper involves eight interrelated parameters. The application of this approach established the ratio of five
structural-functional classes of phraseological units used in films as well as the range of situations and the dominant register of communication that ensure the characters' choice of phraseological units to achieve their pragmatic goals. The use of phraseological units may depend on the gender of the addresser and the addressee. In the films under analysis, phraseological units occur more often in reactive utterances than in stimulus utterances. The interlocutors' reactions to their use can be of three main types: both verbal and non-verbal; only verbal, and only non-verbal. The established pragmatic models revealed a correspondence between the illocutionary intentions realized through phraseological units and the achieved perlocutionary effects. As was found, the use of phraseological means is successful in cases of full or partial semantic-pragmatic accordance of a phraseological unit with the addressee’s reaction.