Invariant Tags migrating from the UK to Italy and back

Invariant Tags characterise spontaneous conversation in everyday English. These non-standard variants consist in structures that are independent of that of the main sentence to which they are appended and are expressed by single lexical items, such as adverbial and interjectional particles of the type of right?, okay?, yes/yeah?, eh? and no? (Algeo, 1988). The investigation on invariant tags is generally carried out within sociolinguistics, which takes into consideration regional varieties of English, since both the form and the pronunciation may vary – i.e. see, for instance, the Scottish variant ‘e’ of BrE ‘eh’ (Millar and Brown, 1979; Miller, 2004) – (Stenström, 1997; Stenström, Andersen and Hasund, 2002). In this sense, an interesting type of invariant tag, typical of the London area, is innit, which was initially mainly used by ethnic minorities, who then have influenced the standard variety (Andersen, 2001). Since film language aims at imitating spontaneous face-to-face conversation (Taylor, 1999), especially in recent productions where linguistic realism is one of the strengths to attract the audience’s attention (Pavesi, 2005), many features of orality appear in films, including invariant tags. In this paper, I therefore investigate the use of invariant tags in some English movies, which mainly portray everyday conversation, such as Secrets and Lies (1996, M. Leigh), Sliding Doors (1997, P. Howitt), Bend it like Beckham (2002, G. Chada) and Green Street Hooligans (2005, L. Alexander). In these films, linguistic regional variation and cross-cultural aspects also come into play. As a consequence, I compare the original versions with their dubbed versions in Italian, in order to see whether and how invariant tags are translated. In fact two different problems arise. The first has to do with all types of invariant tags, which actually have formal equivalents in Italian. Yet, despite this at least partial overlapping between the two languages, it is still to be ascertained whether the dubbed version succeeds in expressing the same function, with the same strength of the illocutionary force of the tagged utterance, in comparison with the original version. Besides, the frequency in the use of tags has to be compared. The second deals with specific invariant forms, such as innit, which are diatopically and diastratically marked and are typical forms of the English language. One further step in this research is to verify whether the same translating options – i.e. the most frequent and typical translation equivalents for tags – are actually employed in original Italian films that share some of the features of the English films previously examined, such as Ovosodo (1997, P. Virzì), L’ultimo Bacio (2000, G. Muccino), Pane e Tulipani (2000, S. Soldini) and Santa Maradona (2001, M. Ponti).