Prosody and Illocutionary Force in English-Language Film Discourse: Communicative Intentions in the Iron Lady

The article examines the role of prosody in the realization and interpretation of communicative intentions in English -language film discourse. The study proceeds from the assumption that communicative intention cannot always be reconstructed from the lexic al and grammatical form of an utterance alone. Pitch movement, nuclear stress, prominence, speech rate, rhythm, pausing, and intensity may reinforce the literal meaning of an utterance, modify it, or contribute to a shift in its illocutionary for ce. The theoretical framework combines speech act theory with discourse-pragmatic approaches to intonation and recent research on prosodic signalling of communicative intentions. Particular attention is given to film dialogue as a scripted but interactionally organized form of discourse in which verbal, prosodic, paralinguistic, and visual resources operate simultaneously. Selected scenes from Phyllida Lloyd’s The Iron Lady are used for a qualitative prosodic-pragmatic analysis of assertion, challenge, directive force, evaluation, irony, and interactional control. The analysis suggests that prosodic meaning is not attached mechanically to isolated contours. Rather, it emerges through the interaction of pitch, prominence, tempo, pausing, lexical choice, sequential position, and the social relationship between participants. In politically charged exchanges, prosody may transform formally interrogative or mitigated structures into challenges or directives, while contrastive prominence and controlled pausing contribute to the construction of authority and stance. The findings support a contextual approach to prosody and demonstrate the methodological value of film discourse for studying the relationship between speech form and communicative action.