WORD PLAY IN FILM DISCOURSE: LEXICAL-SEMANTIC LEVEL
The article contains a description and analysis of means of word play in film discourse, namely in TV series produced in the United Kingdom and the United States in the last two decades. The article gives a brief overview of published linguistic works on the nature of word play and various views of scientists on concepts related to the word play and deals with the classical works in the field of the word play as well as with recent studies. The diversity of forms and techniques of word play in the cinematography makes it necessary to conduct a more thorough research. The article discusses the main types of word play at the lexical-semantic level as the most frequent within the framework of this study, such as polysemy, synonymy, literalisation of meaning of an utterance, double actualization of meaning, as well as word play with the use of stylistic devices of allusion and irony. Although these means of the wordplay are not met exclusively in the material under study, they appear to play the key role in the film discourse and comprise the bulk of the cases of word play in the discussed type of discourse. The importance of the context of the word play in film discourse is proved once again. The article presents and describes rich illustrative material taken from the TV series produced in the United Kingdom and in the USA over the past two decades. A careful contextual analysis of the use of word play is carried out throughout the paper.