A Contextualized Pragmastylistic Analysis Of Interpersonal Relationships Of Movie Scripts

Movies bring a lot of entertainment to people in the modern society, while movie scripts, the essence of movies, have long been neglected. It has been acknowledged that the movie script is a unique form of literature, but linguistic studies on movie scripts lack vitality when traditional literary works arouse scholars’enthusiasm.As a unique form of literature, the movie script has its special characteristics. When the screenwriter takes care of the stylistic features of the script, he also needs to think of the pragmatic aims:the interaction within the script and the interaction with outside recipients. It should be noticed that these interactions happen in the context of the movie script. This is why the current author incorporates pragmastylistics and contextualization together into this analysis.The current analysis tends to use the pragmastylistic approach to discuss the interpersonal relationships of movie scripts from the perspective of Gumperz’s Contextualization Theory. Taking the movie script of Forrest Gump as the target of the case study, the current author not only pays attention to the communications of this movie script but also the style of it by considering the movie script as a unique context, to shed light on the understanding and creation of movie scripts. Based on the results of the analysis, the relationships of a movie script include micro-and macro-level interactions. The former are relationships among characters within the script, and the latter are relationships between the screenwriter and the recipients (intended readers and intended audience). These relationships react differently in narration, dialogue and aside&monologue, which are explained reasonably by the integration of pragmastylistics and Gumperz’s Contextualization Theory.This thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter One is the brief introduction of the whole thesis. Chapter Two is the literature review of pragmastylistics, contextualization and previous studies on movie scripts. Chapter Three provides the theoretical background and offers the contextualized pragmastylistic approach to interpersonal relationships. Chapter Four presents the case study of the interpersonal relationships of the script of Forrest Gump by the approach proposed in Chapter Three. Chapter Five serves as the conclusion of the thesis. Major findings and implications of the study are stated as well as the limitations of the present study and prospects of further research.It is anticipated that this analysis will draw more attention to the movie script and offer insights to the creation of good movie scripts.