‘What I Means and What I Says Is Two Different Things’

This chapter presents an evaluation of the two film adaptations of Roald Dahl&s;s children&s;s classic book The BFG , and considers how screenwriters, directors and actors have employed varying linguistic and filmic strategies to bring the larger-than-life character to the big screen. The analysis forms two parts, with an initial stage of breaking down Dahl&s;s use of external lexical and grammatical deviation (see Gregoriou, 2014) to construct a character which is simultaneously fantastical and relatable. Insight is provided from analysis of Dahl&s;s original draft of the book (with special thanks to the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre) to show how a late decision in the writing process allowed for this now beloved character to be written with a dialogic style which constructs him as sympathetic and non-threatening to child readers. The second part of the analysis provides a comparative multimodal analysis of the two film adaptations of the book: Cosgrove&s;s (1989 ) animated version and Spielberg&s;s (2016) live-action version. While both adaptations of the book embrace Dahl&s;s linguistic stylisation, they do so with distinct degrees of felicity, consistency and innovation, and they combine the linguistic mode with other semiotic channels (accent, visual, auditory and ‘filmic’/cinematographic) to produce a multimodal communication of character (see inter alia Bednarek 2012) which variably complements that of the original text. This study adds to and augments a growing canon of work in the area of telecinematic stylistics (Piazza et al., 2011; Bednarek, 2018; Hoffman & Kirner-Ludwig, 2020), providing the most in-depth to-date evaluation of Dahl&s;s creative stylistic process for this story, alongside valuable insights from a telecinematic perspective of the myriad semiotic resources exploited by film-makers to construct a memorable character for an audience.