The Language of the Screen: A Corpus-based Study of Globally-awarded Film Screenplays

Films, a visual art that initiates with the screenplay as one genre of creative writing, shape social beliefs and individual behavior. The present study investigates the sub-genre of action in ten screenplays that were made into films by international film producers. The current sample was compiled into one corpus of film scripts, utilizing two corpus analysis tools, namely, AntConc and Voyant Tools, to examine the linguistic peculiarities of action in screenplays. The analysis employed the theory of Systemic Functional Grammar, in particular, the Ideational and the Textual Metafunctions, to examine three linguistic aspects of the sub-genre: the lexical component, the thematic structure, and the verbal group element. The findings revealed that screenwriters tend to use technical and straightforward language, in a condensed style whose purpose may facilitate the process of film production. The findings also revealed that a film script is a pre-existing model of the visual story in the cognition of the screenwriter, and that films are both language and language system.