The Construalization of Sequential Scenes in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code: A Cognitive Semantic Study

Abstract

One of the challenges that cognitive linguists face is how the parts of a scene are arranged and how sequential actions are joined together to form a wider scene. The order of actions in a scene is affected by how we see that scene, which is reflected in the language we use. The current study aims to develop a model of construalization to see how sequential scenes in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code are viewed. A group of operations have been suggested under three umbrella terms: saliency, perspective and comparison. The proposed operations can base on either syntactic (such as grammatical saliency) or semantic properties (such as zooming). The study chose 28 actions in two broad scenes. The present study concluded that construalization plays an important role in the viewing arrangement of dynamic scenes. The place of entities in a scene affects our conceptualization of them; whenever the entity moves, our viewpoint changes.