Allusion as a means of implementing intertextuality in English-language online film review

Abstract

The article discusses ways to actualize allusion as an intertextual element. Intertextual inclusions in the texts of the film review are designed to illustrate the degree of professional competence of the reviewer and his interpretative qualities using the comparative analytical method. Allusion, being a stylistic device for the realization of intertextuality, contains a certain pretext. This pretext performs the function of a precedent phenomenon associated with some collective invariant component of linguistic consciousness. The purpose of this article is to consider in film review the ways in which allusion functions as an intertextual reference. The empirical material of this study was a corpus of 30 movie reviews from 2021–2023, taken from the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. Direct or indirect reference to a specific cinematic phenomenon not only increases the general erudition and awareness of the reader, but also serves as a means of providing a perlocative effect when reading this film review. Allusion, being a means of realizing the author’s pragmatic intentions, performs a comparative function by building intertextual references. The referents in film reviews are the names of films, directors, actors and other precedent units of the world of cinema.

Keywords

• movie review
• intertextuality
• allusion
• precedent phenomenon
• reference
• pragmatics
• english