Professor Pia Knoeferle:

"The role of the body in language processing - in action movies and dialogue-centred films”

Abstract:

I will consider the role of the body in relation to language in action movies (as exemplified by “Skyfall”) and dialog-centered films (“Sense and Sensibility”) from the perspective of cognitive science and film analysis. In the cognitive sciences, recent approaches suggest that our bodily and sensory experience plays a central role for language and cognition (‘embodiment’). A strong position would arguably predict that the type of situation (and movie) should not matter much for how important bodily aspects are for language processing. If we consider films as a sort of miniature world (with certain caveats), then genre analyses also permit us to make predictions about the role of the body for language and communication. Genre definitions might lead us to expect a more pronounced role of the body for action movies than for dialog-centered movies. Drawing on results from the analyses of (small-scale) movie corpora, I will argue that genre-based definitions (action movie vs. dialog-centered romantic comedy) fall short of making entirely accurate predictions for the role of the body in the (film) world. Overall, we need more fine-grained analyses of world-language relations to accurately predict how precisely the non-linguistic world and our experience with it contribute to language (processing).