English tags: A close-up on film language, dubbing and conversation

This 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.