Abstract

This paper synthesizes and extends all previous accounts of filmic montage made within the broadly Metzian semiotic tradition in order to demonstrate that the semiotics of film and of verbal language share major features of their organization. Drawing on recent advances in formal and functional linguistic discourse semantics, the paper provides an analysis scheme that supports a film-as-discourse perspective along both the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of semiotic description. Previous approaches are shown to have been restricted to views of compositional semantics only appropriate for syntax. This has compromised their effectiveness for providing an appropriate empirical basis for investigating film.