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Analysing political discourse in film language: A multimodal approach
No full textAudiovisual products, due to their intrinsic multisemiotic nature in which each mode contributes to the construction of meaning, have widely proven to be ideal material both for research purposes and for teaching. This is especially the case of films which, despite their fictional character, have often been used in the context of language learning (see among the most recent works, Kaiser, Shibahara 2014; Bruti 2015) because they are actually considered as “an authentic source material (that is, created for native speakers and not learners of the language)” (Kaiser 2011: 233). Particularly interesting is the case of political drama films, as they represent a good opportunity to analyse a quite faithful representation of political discourse, which is strongly characterised by bodily behaviour (Poggi, Pelachaud 2008). More specifically, gestures, gaze, facial expression, pauses, and intonation all convey meanings and have a persuasive import in communication (Poggi, Vincze 2008).
The present paper intends to explore the ways in which non-verbal elements co-occur with certain rhetorical strategies often employed in political discourse, such as parallelism, metaphor, and simile. (Beard 2000; Partington, Taylor 2010). For this purpose, some extracts from political drama films such as The Ides of March (2011, George Clooney) and The Iron Lady (2011, Phyllida Lloyd) will be analysed. Due to the paramount importance of both audio and visual elements, a multimodal approach will be adopted (Jewitt 2009). More specifically, the first step in the analysis consists of the selection and creation of video clips where relevant communication exchanges are present. These will then be investigated with the multimodal annotation software ELAN (Wittenburg et al. 2006) to determine how various semiotic resources work together to construct meaning in political discourse. Particular attention will be paid to the interplay of verbal and non-verbal signals (e.g. gaze direction, hand/arm gestures, body positioning, etc.) in order to provide useful tools for research and teaching in ESP contexts
A multimodal analysis of spoken medical English in expert-to-expert interaction in TV programmes
Full text linkThe present paper intends to investigate oral communication between professionals in medical contexts. Apparently, this is quite a neglected area of research in the abundant literature on spoken medical English, which mainlyfocuses on doctor-patient encounters. Due to the difficulty in finding available data on real sequences in this domain, this study aims to analyse this type of specialised discourse, within the Multimodal Analysis framework and with a holistic approach, in two different American TV products, namely the medical drama "Code Black" (M. Seitzman, 2015-present), well known for its plausibility and verisimilitude as far as medical procedures are concerned, and the medical docu-series "Boston Med" (2010). On the verbal level, special attention will be paid to vocabulary, speech acts, register variation according to the participants’ role and to the level of emergency of the situation. Moreover, and most importantly, analysis will be carried out also on the non-verbal level through the multimodal annotator software ELAN (Wittenburg, Brugman, Russel, Klassmann & Sloetjes,2006), thus integrating verbal and non-verbal cues (e.g. gaze direction, hand/armgestures, etc.) to show how a multimodal approach can actually help to interpret a message, especially in situated communicative and specialised contexts
A multimodal approach to teaching Business English through films: A case study
Full text linkAudiovisual products, due to their intrinsic multisemiotic nature, in which each mode contributes to meaning making, have widely proven to be ideal material both for research purposes and for teaching. This is especially the case of films, which, despite their fictional character, have often been used in the context of language learning. As the concept of multiliteracies has become pivotal in language teaching, the use of films reflects a multimodal approach that can help students learn to exploit modes beyond verbal language (e.g., visual, gestural, spatial) to both understand and produce texts in the target language more effectively. This becomes particularly important in situated communicative contexts where domain-specific discursive, pragmatic and cultural features can create significant obstacles for language learners. The present paper focuses on a particular type of specialised discourse, i.e. business discourse, and intends to explore the ways in which films can be utilized as resource material in the English for Business and Economics class at the university. Some clips from a film representing this domain and with relevant communication exchanges that portray different business contexts and genres will be analysed both on the verbal and non-verbal level through a multimodal annotation software. This allows for the integration of verbal and non-verbal cues (e.g., gaze direction, hand/arm gestures, etc.) to show how a multimodal approach can actually help students to interpret a message, especially in ESP contexts
English tags: A close-up on film language, dubbing and conversation
No full textThis book is a thorough quantitative and qualitative study of a typical phenomenon pertaining to the English spoken language; namely question tags (QTs) and invariant tags. More specifically, English tags are analysed on the syntactic, pragmatic and prosodic level, taking into account cross-varietal differences as well as both visual and auditory dimensions, in order to get a more precise interpretation of their communicative functions. This is made possible by examining film language, since films, being complex semiotic “texts”, provide a more complete set of parameters for analysis, especially in the case of QTs, where intonation is crucial for their interpretation. The study of their function is based not only on their formal properties, but is integrated with the use of spectrograms, which makes it possible to actually “visualise” the prosody of tags and to back up the results with material evidence. Moreover, tags are also examined from a translational perspective, with analysis focusing on the transposition of tags in Italian dubbing, a specific type of audiovisual translation, for two main reasons: firstly, to check how and to what extent tags are rendered in Italian, a language which does not have so structured a set of equivalent expressions, and secondly, to see how much space they are granted in a typically “constrained” translation like dubbing, which is severely influenced by the visual dimension. After this, the use of the various translating options in Italian dubbing is studied in Italian original film language and compared with spontaneous conversation in both languages, by analysing data in corpora of spontaneous speech both in English and Italian to ascertain whether the use of tags and their Italian counterparts in film language is natural or artificial.
The present work is the first to study the syntactic and prosodic properties of English tags from an integrated pragmatic and translational perspective. The study also qualifies as contrastive in that the use of these conversational routines is analysed in two different languages (English and Italian), as well as in different genres and varieties, including film language, dubbese and spontaneous speech
Translating English non-standard tags in Italian dubbing
Full text linkEnglish Tag Questions (henceforth TQ) are a complex linguistic phenomenon. This complexity derives from the fact that their meaning/function is determined by the interplay of different linguistic levels, namely syntax, pragmatics and phonetics – i.e. intonation. Besides, the formation of tags often undergoes various exceptions while speaking, so that on the basis of some sociological parameters, namely diatopic varieties, social class and cultural background, speakers use non-standard variants of tags, such as innit – mainly identified with London area – or other forms presenting a lack of concordance in number between operator and subject, such as weren’t it?. It has been observed that recent movies are characterised by quite a faithful reproduction of spontaneous face-to-face conversation (Taylor, 1999), since linguistic realism is necessary to attract the audience’s attention (Pavesi, 2005: 30), and as a consequence, many features of orality appear in films – i.e. hesitations, overlapping, fillers, ellipsis and also tag questions. In this paper, I would like to focus on non-standard variants of canonical tags, such as innit – functioning either as a proper TQ or as an invariant tag (Andersen, 2001) – and tags of the type of weren’t it, in some British movies, where much space is devoted to conversation in everyday language, namely Secrets and Lies (1996, M. Leigh), The Full Monty (1997, P. Cattaneo), Bend it like Beckham (2002, G. Chada) and Green Street (2005, L. Alexander). The predominant spoken variety is British English, even if other varieties are present, such as American, Scottish and Northern English spoken in Sheffield. Moreover, language also varies according to the social class to which the characters belong, ranging from the upper to the working class, and the ethnic group of provenance – i.e. see the presence of Indian and black characters. Indeed, generally non-standard tags are used by specific groups of characters, who belong to the working class or to determinate ethnic groups. Therefore, I will analyse non-standard variants on the basis of diastratic and diatopic differences. Since Italian does not display such varied and complex set of forms as English does, it is often very difficult to translate TQs into Italian. For this reason, I will compare the original versions of these movies with their dubbed versions in order to pinpoint how and whether these types of non-standard tags are translated into Italian, whether their indexical function is preserved and which strategies are employed to produce the same effect of non-standard forms
"Mind you, that's just, like, a guestimation": A diachronic analysis of morphological creativity in American teen talk and dubbing
Full text linkThe language of adolescents has always been of particular interest to linguists mostly for being extremely creative. Adolescence is, in fact, a transition stage that coincides with the entrance into secondary school, where teenagers strive to construct their own identity, mainly through linguistic innovation (Eckert 1989, 1997, 2004). In this sense, language becomes a strong identity marker (Edwards 2009) whose role becomes crucial in the portrayal of adolescent characters in films. The present paper aims at investigating the language of American adolescents diachronically in three famous movies of different decades from the 1980s to 2000s, namely Sixteen Candles (1984, Hughes), Clueless (1995, Heckerling) and Juno (2007, Reitman), which revolve around teenagers’ life at high school. The first step in the analysis consists in the identification of some characterising features of teen talk, especially focusing on word formation. Then, the analysis will be carried out contrastively and cross-culturally from a translational perspective, since these phenomena will be also investigated in Italian dubbing. More specifically, it will be ascertained whether or not these features are transposed into Italian, if so, pinpointing the most common strategies employed as well as the strategies used for compensation when, on the contrary, the complexity and difficulty in rendering certain linguistic and cultural specific phenomena hamper to find efficient translating solutions in the target text. Finally, problems deriving from this type of audiovisual translation, like lip synch, will also be taken into account and it will also be checked if the dubbed version succeeds in depicting the characters in the same way as in the original text
Representing varieties of English in film language and dubbing: The case of Indian English
Full text linkThe article focuses on the linguistic choices adopted in the original version of some films to represent the 'Indianness' (Bhatt 2008: 546) of the characters, also when Indian English encounters other varieties of English- i.e. British English in Bride and Prejudice or Desi in Monsoon Wedding - and then discusses how cultural and social values travel across cultures in the light of the most recurrent strategies adopted in the Italian dub. By Indian English we refer to Vernacular Indian English - i.e. a non standard variety that - shows strong identification with local ideologies??? (Bhatt 2008) and bears traces of the influence of local languages of India, thus differentiating itself from proper Standard Indian English, which in contrast is essentially similar in its core syntax to Standard British English, from which differs only in the domain of phonetics
Specialized and culture-bound knowledge dissemination through spoken tourism discourse: Multimodal strategies in guided tours and documentaries
Full text linkThe distinctive features of most instances of tourism discourse are their predominantly low specialization and their hybrid generic and semantic nature. Tourism discourse draws from a range of genres and specialized domains, including but not limited to art, history, economics, architecture, and geography to name but a few. Through its communicative strategies, it leads the tourists and their “tourist gaze” (Urry 2002) in their real or imaginary journey, it mediates the tourist experience and contributes to closing the gap between their culture and the destination’s culture. These leading and mediating operations are performed by making culture-specific knowledge and specialized concepts accessible to the general public (Cappelli 2016; Cappelli, Masi forthcoming). For this reason, tourism discourse offers an ideal vantage point to investigate popularization and knowledge dissemination strategies. Much linguistic research on written tourism discourse has been carried out over the past two decades. However, to the best of our knowledge, spoken genres remain largely unexplored with few exceptions. Our study intends to contribute to closing that gap by investigating the way in which multimodal semiotic resources are exploited in oral communication in tourism to make specialized and culture-bound concepts accessible to the audience. First, we present the data obtained by the analysis of a small sample of clips of guided tours and documentaries representing various domains. Then, we illustrate the way in which verbal and non-verbal strategies are used to create accessibility in a genre-specific way. Finally, we propose a classification of the data analysed as belonging to three strictly interconnected and yet distinct genres, namely documentaries, “docu-tours” and guided tours, and we provide some conclusions regarding the relevance of the study for professional development and pedagogical applications
The Transposition of Cultural Identity of Desi/Brit-Asian in Italian Dubbing
Full text linkThe transposition of linguistic varieties in dubbing always raises several problems that are generally solved by levelling out diatopic variation (Pernigoni, 2005; Bonsignori and Bruti, 2008; Bonsignori, 2009). Especially in cases like Desi/Brit-Asian, a variety that reflects its own cultural ideologies and a certain sense of belonging and identity, it is even more difficult to render all the sociolinguistic values that come into play at all levels.
This paper intends to identify the most characterising linguistic traits of Desi/Brit-Asian in a small corpus of films, including East is East (1999, D. O’Donnell), Bend it like Beckham (2002, G. Chada), Ae Fond Kiss (2004, K. Loach) and The Namesake (2006, M. Nair), which portray the multilingual and multicultural melting pot in nowadays society of South-Asian immigrant communities living in the UK and the USA and, above all, the clash/encounter between different linguistic systems – i.e. English and non-English – that gives rise to a sort of ‘hybrid language’ (Balirano, 2007). The next step in this analysis is to see whether or not these features are rendered in Italian dubbing, and if so, to pinpoint the most common strategies employed as well as the strategies used for compensation when, on the contrary, the target language cannot find efficient translating solutions, also checking if the dubbed version succeeds in expressing the same level of ‘Indianness’ (Bhatt, 2008) of the characters in these films. Finally, one last step in this research is to verify whether the same linguistic strategies are actually employed in an original Italian film, namely Oggi Sposi (2009, L. Lucini), to represent Indian filmic speech
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