Language of film sounds: developing a metalanguage for talking about film sounds as literary devices in the language arts classes

Abstract This paper presents a metalanguage for teachers to teach about the functions of music and sound effects in fictional media and how it contributes to the understanding of film plot. This is part of a larger study from a Systemic Functional Semiotics (SFS) perspective examining the potential of sound in constructing key literary elements such as character, plot, setting and broader literary and cinematic effects. The metalanguage is developed by conceptualising three metafunctions of cinematic sounds (i.e. ideational, interpersonal, and textual) based on the analysis of the film data selected for this study. This paper starts with inventorising observable sounds we can hear in the films, followed by a description of sound qualities as the “signifier” and their meaning potential as the “signified”. It provides evidence that in terms of plot construction, cinematic sounds can represent a narrative story arc, realise events and properties of events. The metalanguage as well as the modelling of the metafunctions of film sound in the current study also provides multimodality researchers with a tool to analyse multimodal texts where sound is a key component such as films, video clips, video games, and other forms of multimodal digital texts.