Psycholinguistic Image of Joy (in the Computer-Animated Film Inside Out)

Abstract

The paper is focused on the correlation between the psychological archetype of a film character and the linguistic elements composing their speech. The Nurturer archetype is represented in the film Inside Out by the personalized emotion Joy. Joy is depicted as an antropomorphous female character, whose purpose is to keep her host, a young girl Riley, happy. As the Nurturer, Joy is completely focused on Riley’s happiness, which is expressed by lexico-semantic group ‘happy’, positive evaluative tokens, exclamatory sentences, promissive speech acts, and repetitions. She needs the feeling of connectedness with other members of her family, which is revealed by lexico-semantic groups ‘support’ and ‘help’. She is ready to sacrifice everything to save the girl in her care, which is demonstrated by modal verbs, frequent word-combination ‘for Riley’, and directives.