The Linguistic Anatomy of a Villain: A Discourse of Villainy

From the beginnings of human culture to the multimedia environment in which we live today, stories have been used as powerful socializing and pedagogical tools, providing communities with clear patterns of acceptable and abhorrent behavior through their heroes and villains. For this to be effective, it was necessary to code such characters in a way that was immediately understood by the story’s recipients. One such code is the characters’ language and how it is used to create a cultural model of particular character types. This thesis aims to examine the language of villains, its features and the way they interact in creating a recognizable villainous identity. To do this, a corpus of nine films produced by the Disney company in the decade between 1989 and 1999, a period known as the “Disney Renaissance” was examined. The study comprises two parts. Firstly, auditory analysis was conducted to examine one of the most salient ways in which language is manifested: the characters’ accents. Secondly, discourse analysis of the main villains’ language was conducted, with the intention of exploring how language is used to construct certain villainous identities, especially in regards to power or lack thereof. It was found that negatively coded characters tend to be visually and linguistically characterized as foreign, and are therefore more likely to speak in non-American accents. Furthermore, the villains’ language use revealed a dual nature with regards to power, with them presenting both a victimized and non-threatening, as well as an authoritative and powerful figure. Finally, some implications as well as potential for further research were discussed