"Mind you, that's just, like, a guestimation": A diachronic analysis of morphological creativity in American teen talk and dubbing


Abstract


The 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.

DOI Code: 10.1285/i22390359v15p53

Keywords: Identity; Creativity; Morphology; English; Dubbing

References


Bertinetto P.M. 2001, Blends and syllable structure. A four-fold comparison, in Lorente M., Alturo N., Boix E., Lloret M.R. and Payrató L. (eds.), La gramàtica i la semàntica en l’estudi de la variació, Promociones y Publicaciones Universitarias, Barcelona, pp. 59-112.

Bierma N. 2005, It’s been, like, 10 whole years since Clueless helped spread Valley slang, in Chicago Tribune, 20 July, online edition, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2005-07-20/features/0507190293_1_clueless-slang-amy-heckerling (19.11.2015).

Bucholtz M. 1999, You da man: Narrating the racial other in the production of white masculinity, in “Journal of Sociolinguistics” 3 [4], pp. 443-460.

Carter R. 2004, Language and Creativity: The Art of Common Talk, Routledge, London.

Chiaro D. 2009, Issues in audiovisual translation, in Munday J. (ed.) The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies, Routledge, London/NewYork, pp. 141-165.

Cortellazzo M.A. 2010, Linguaggio giovanile, in Enciclopedia dell’italiano Treccani online, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/linguaggio-giovanile_(Enciclopedia-dell'Italiano)/ (19.11.2015).

D’Achille P. 2003, L’italiano contemporaneo, Il Mulino, Bologna.

Demartini S. 2011, Sigle, in Enciclopedia dell’italiano Treccani online, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/sigle_(Enciclopedia_dell'Italiano)/ (19.11.2015).

Dressler W.U. and Merlini Barbaresi L. 1994, Morphopragmatics: Diminutives and Intensifiers in Italian, German and Other Languages, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York.

Eckert P. 1989, Jocks and Burnouts: Social Identity in the High School, Teachers College Press, New York. Eckert P. 1997, Age as a sociolinguistic variable, in Coulmas F. (ed.), The Handbook of Sociolinguistics, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 151-176.

Eckert P. 2004, Adolescent Language, in Finegan E. and Rickford J.R. (eds), The Language of the USA. Themes for the Twenty-first Century, CUP, Cambridge, pp. 361-374.

Edwards J. 2009, Language and Identity, CUP, Cambridge.

Fanfani M. 2010, Anglicismi, in Enciclopedia dell’italiano Treccani online, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/anglicismi_(Enciclopedia_dell'Italiano)/ (19.11.2015).

Labov W. 1972, The linguistic consequences of being a lame, in Labov W. (ed.), Language in the Inner City, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, pp. 255-292.

Mattiello E. 2013, Extra-grammatical Morphology in English. Abbreviations, Blends, Reduplicatives, and Related Phenomena, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York.

Plag I., Braun M., Lappe S., Schramm S. 2007, Introduction to English Linguistics, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York.

Start S. 2008, This is, like, English, Juno?, in New York Post, 24 February, online edition.

http://nypost.com/2008/02/24/this-is-like-english-juno/ (19.11.2015).


Full Text: pdf

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.
کاغذ a4

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribuzione - Non commerciale - Non opere derivate 3.0 Italia License.