Abstracts - Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa

ARIANNA MAIORANI, LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITYDYNAMICITY PATTERNS IN NARRATIVE SEQUENCES: A MULTIMODAL READING OFENGLISH AND AMERICAN FILMS DUBBED IN ITALIANThis paper stems from a research in progress that is part of a much larger projectcalled “English and Italian audiovisual language: translation and language learning”(2010), that involves the University of Pavia (Italy), the University of Malta, andLoughborough University (UK). The project is funded by the Alma Mater TicinensisFoundation, it focuses on English and its Italian translation in films, and basicallyinvestigates the linguistic translation of film scripts and its implications with respectto the language learning aspects of audio-visual products.My specific contribution focuses on space as a semiotic dimension experienced inon line environments (Martinec & van Leeuwen 2008) and analysed through amultimodal perspective (Kress & van Leeuwen 2006) stemmed from SFL. I willanalyse four films from the project’s corpus using a method I am currentlyimplementing (Maiorani 2009, 2011). The method assumes that in a public who isfamiliar with the experience of hyper-environments, engagement Eisenstein (1922-34) 1988) is elicited by the director of a film as an interactive response to how theviewer is construed with respect to environments as semiotic space. My aim is toestablish whether there are linguistic patterns in the Transitivity structure of Englishdialogue that are systematically altered in the Italian translation, and whether thesealterations, in combination with the dynamicity patterns (Mitry 2000) of selectfilmic sequences, may change the perception of the same sequences in the twolanguages.ReferencesEisenstein, Sergei M., Selected Works. Writings, 1922-34, ed. By Richard Taylor, London, BFIPublishinng, 1988.Gunther Kress & Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images. The Grammar of Visual Deasign,London, Routledge, 2006.Maiorani, Arianna, The Matrix Phenomenon. A linguistic and multimodal analysis,Saarbrücken, VDM, 2009.----------------------- “Reading movies as interactive messages: a proposal for a new method ofanalysis”, Semiotica, De Gruyter, (2011 forthcoming).Martinec, Radan & Theo van Leeuwen, The Language of New Media Design. Theory andPractice, London, Routledge, 2008.Mitry, Jean, Semiotics and the Analysis of Film, London, The Athlone Press, 2000.PAPER SESSION 9E - ROOM 5 - FRIDAY, 28 JULYISFC38 Book of Abstracts Page 33 Lisbon, July 2011