A Study On The Descriptive Language Of The American Screenplay Brokeback Mountain

Film,as a popular art form and entertainment media, is a visual media which syncretizes various art forms. As the blueprint of film shooting, screenplay plays a significant role through the process of planning, writing, shooting, etc. The success of the film is closely related to the quality of the screenplay. In recently year, the demands for excellent screenplays are increasing rapidly. However, compared with the literary forms such as novel, drama, etc. or the language forms such as advertisement, news and so on, there are few researches which are conducted on screenplay, and the books on screenplay writings are only restrained to some translation versions of foreign monographs. The quality of the screenplay is usually judged from artistic or aesthetic aspects instead of the linguistic or stylistic perspectives. As a special language variety, screenplay has distinctive features both in the form and content.The thesis aims to do a tentative study on the features of the descriptive language in American screenplay. In the framework of Systemic-Functional Grammar, the thesis makes a close analysis of the American screenplay Brokeback Mountain in the Transitivity System, the Mood system, and the Theme-Rheme System respectively from the three metafunctions - the experimental, interpersonal and textual functions. Through the research, the author has found out some linguistic features of the descriptive language in the screenplay. The main findings of the paper are of great significance to the screenplay writing especially the choices of language.