An Analysis on the Techniques of Movie Commentary from the Perspective of Relevance Theory: A Case Study of Verbal Behaviour in the Commentary of Titanic

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-551-5_90How to use a DOI?

Keywords

movie commentary; relevance theory; cognitive effects; processing effort

Abstract

Analysing movie from the perspective of relevance theory in linguistics is an emerging direction. In terms of the previous studies, many scholars applied relevance theory to study the movie dialogue, mainly focusing on the explicature and implicature. In this research, the researcher chose a new research object, the verbal behaviour of movie commentator in the online short videos, and a new perspective, the cognitive effects and processing effort in the relevance theory. This study aims to analyse the verbal behaviour of a speaker, using the research method of case study, focusing on the speaker’s movie commentaries of Titanic on TikTok. This article extracted three speech segments of the speaker to study, finding that the utilization of implicature and contrast has a positive impact on enhancing cognitive effects, thereby, the speaker leads the audience to have a deeper understanding of the movie. Meanwhile, the speaker gave an explanation of his argument in detail. With the decomposition of the core argument of the speech, the audience will grasp the precise meaning of the speech with less processing effort. Therefore, the amplified cognitive effects and the diminished processing effort are the two characters of the speaker’s speech, stimulating the audience to give a large number of likes to the speaker. Furthermore, this research hopes to give some inspiration for studying the linguistic phenomenon of the short video speaker. Nowadays, more and more individuals are becoming social media influencers relying on their excellent verbal skills. Studying this phenomenon from the perspective of linguistics will help scholars to explore the influence of language and the psychological changes of the masses towards speech.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xinmiao Li
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/03/26
TI  - An Analysis on the Techniques of Movie Commentary from the Perspective of Relevance Theory: A Case Study of Verbal Behaviour in the Commentary of Titanic
BT  - Proceeding of 2025 8th International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 837
EP  - 850
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-551-5_90
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-551-5_90
ID  - Li2026
ER  -