Analysis Of Cognitive Conflicts In The Film Life Of Pi

Frame theory and figure ground theory are becoming more and more important incognitive linguistics by taking human being s cognitive factors such as their past experience,social factors and personal background into consideration, which are ignored by many othertheories in studying human language. Different salient part helps the viewers to constructdifferent cognitive frames which arouses cognitive conflict. The film Life of Pi presented twoversions of story arousing cognitive conflicts in the audience. Thus, this thesis aims atanalyzing the viewers cognitive conflicts from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.Based on frame theory and figure ground theory in macro level, combining withForceville s multimodal metaphor approaches in micro level, the thesis analyzes severalselected multimodal metaphors which are to elucidate the story without animals in detail to findhow cognitive conflicts are manipulated by the filmmakers and how such conflicts areexperienced and resolved by the viewer in the whole film.The findings reveal that the filmmakers framed the viewers cognitive frame by exploitingmulti-modality markers metaphorically overtly and covertly including both verbal andnon-verbal modes. Meanwhile, the viewers resolve such cognitive conflicts by re-adjustingtheir cognitive frames and embarking on reviewing the flashbacks of the film. The resultsfurther demonstrate that the film as a whole with two alternative stories and cognitive framespresented by the same film is the implicit metaphor of the famous vase/face illusion which canbe best analyzed by figure-ground segregation theory in cognitive linguistics allowing viewersto perceive different pictures from the same illusion.The thesis makes an attempt to apply the linguistic theory in analyzing the audiencescognitive conflict in film s appreciation. Tentative suggestions are put forward in the end so asto contribute to the film plots study from the cognitive perspective in future.