An Analysis Of Voice-over’s Linguistic Features From The Perspective Of The Figure-ground Theory

When the sound was adopted into film, it greatly changed the film nature. As one of the film sound, voice-over has changed the traditional way of film narrative and enriched film narrative discourse. But when it comes to the study of voice-over, it was usually wrapped by the research of film sound. When it appears independently, it was always connected with a specific film. Among all the studies about voice-over, the research results are much more perceptual rather than reasonable.Figure–Ground theory originates from psychology, and later was adopted into the research of language structure; it thus becomes a basic cognitive principle by which language organizes its concepts. With the constantly matured cognitive poetics, dozens of linguistic theories which was related to cognition was applied to the research of literary text. This paper studies the specific movies from the linguistic aspects, it mainly adopts the Figure-Ground theory to study the movie Forrest Gump, the Shawshank Redemption, the Legend of 1900 and Karwai Wong’s film, at the same time, metaphor, discourse analysis and some stylistic theories will be used.This thesis consists of five parts. Chapter one is introduction, including objectives of research, rationale of the research, methodology and data collection and layout of the thesis. Chapter two is literature review. First, the thesis gives a brief introduction of the film sound, and then introduces the background of the voice-over, the types and features of voice-over, the application of Figure-Ground theory to film language. Chapter three is theoretical framework, it mainly discusses the Figure-Ground theory, but at the same time, it also discusses some other theories which be used in analyzing different film voice-over including discourse analysis, focalization, cooperative principle, etc. Chapter four is case study, in this part; the thesis will combine specific movies with certain theories to analyze it. The movies are all famous ones, like Forrest Gump; the Shawshank Redemption; the Legend of 1900 and domestic movies, primarily take Karwai Wong’s film for study. Chapter five is conclusion part; first, the author makes a summary of the whole thesis, and then pointed out the major findings and the limitations.Through analyzing the data, the author concludes that the application of Figure-Ground not only broadens representational space of voice-over, enriches the sound element of film art, but also provides a new research subject for the development of linguistics and cognitive poetics.