The Gingerbread Witch: Acoustic and Cognitive Linguistic Analysis of the Persona

Abstract

The study explores the characterization of the antagonist (Griselda/The Witch) in the earliest adaptation (1987 film) of Hansel and Gretel (1812) in English language. By bringing together the fields of cognitive linguistics and phonology, we observe the variation in metaphor use and voice modulation across two personas of this character. The metaphorical style of each persona is determined by looking at the potentially metaphorical linguistic expressions and their frequency, while the study of the actress’ vocal portrayal includes the prosodic features such as pitch, intensity, speech tempo, and pauses. A notable difference between the two personas was observed in both analyses. Higher metaphor density indicated that the Griselda persona favors a more metaphorical style, while that of The Witch remains literal for the most part. Differences were also found at the level of specific source domains. Acoustically, the contrast between the vocal embodiment of the two personas was evident in the faster speech tempo, an increase in intensity, and less frequent and shorter pauses during the vocal portrayal of The Witch. Although lower F0 values were also noted, the effect was not statistically significant. The obtained acoustic results point to the fact that Griselda’s utterances can generally be interpreted as signaling positive emotional states, whereas those pertaining to The Witch could be characterized as expressing more negative emotions.