Sound and language in discourse: relationships and representations in the film Mulholland Drive

by Lavenère Bastos, Maiza de

Bearing in mind the increasing interest for multimodal analysis of different types of media, my objective in this study is to investigate how relationships and representations among some of the characters of the film Mulholland Drive, by David Lynch, are established through non-verbal and verbal modes. The analysis focuses on elements of the soundtrack and the linguistic choices of specific characters in four scenes of the film. The theoretical basis for the analysis of the elements of the soundtrack derives from the area of multimodality according to the semiotic of sound as proposed by van Leeuwen (1999). And the theoretical perspective for the analysis of the verbal elements draws on aspects of Systemic Functional Linguistics as proposed by Halliday (1984; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). Results enable the understanding of the establishment of relationships among characters and classification of important details in the film, which are evidenced by the use of voice quality together with their linguistic choices. Such findings may contribute to the understanding of how representations and relationships may be built through non-verbal and verbal communication.