Enactive meaning-making in the discourse of theatre and film

Abstract

1. Approaches to meaning-making in multimodal discourse Interest in the broad multimodal issues of theatre and film by philologists and language scholars has increased over the years with the growing role of media in society. There have also been multidisciplinary studies that apply and develop discourse, cognitive, intersubjective and intersemiotic approaches to the analysis of meaning-making in theatre and film. All of them are rooted in theories of semiosis, underpinned by the Peirce model comprising a sign, an object, and an interpretant, providing a translation of the sign. Lately, the growing interest to interpretation has stipulated a “meaning-making turn” in numerous studies of literature, theatre and film. In cinematic and theatre discourse studies, there is a broad variety of approaches to meaningmaking, which share the ideas of ‘added’ information in a screen version or play as compared to the original literary text, on the one hand, and of meaning ‘negotiated’ in theatre or film with the help of various semiotic resources, on the other. As Bateman and Schmidt (2012, p. 4) put it,