[Ads-l] Call for papers for special issue of journal showcasing linguistic approaches to analysis of film

[Davies, Catherine]

Call for Papers:   "Linguists at/on the Movies"

POST SCRIPT: Essays in Film and the Humanities, an interdisciplinary journal that has been publishing for thirty-three years, invites submissions for a special issue on Linguists at/on the Movies.

Studies of film by linguists have, represented a range of interests within the discipline, from early work on specific words used to discuss film (American Speech, Ramsaye 1926, Parry 1928), to pragmatic theory by Tannen and Lakoff analyzing the dialogue in Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage (Semiotica 1984) to Margaret Thomas's "Linguistic Variation in Spike Lee's School Daze" (College English 1994), to Lippi-Green's examination of the representation of African American Vernacular English in Disney films from an ideological perspective (1997),  to a dissertation that tracks the pronunciation of "R" in American films between 1930 and 1970 (Elliott 2000).  Other approaches include examinations of a gendered sense of humor as characterization in Slingblade (Davies 2006) and the authenticity of cinematic dialogue in an Italian film genre (Piazza 2006), both in Journal of Pragmatics; a study of multilingualism in Hong Kong movies as a reflection of changing relations with Mainland Chinese (Fong, Multilingua 2010); and works by McIntyre (2008) and Richardson (2010) in Language and Literature and Dynel (2011) on methodological considerations for linguistic research on film discourse.

The past several years have seen indications of a shift to more linguistically-oriented analyses of film.  In particular we have seen an edited volume (Piazza, Bednarek, and Rossi 2011) and two special journal issues: Journal of Sociolinguistics (2011) and Multilingua (2012). Telecinematic Discourse:  Approaches to the language of films and television series includes seven chapters on film and adopts a multimodal approach.  The Journal of Sociolinguistics special issue, framed in terms of the "sociolinguistics of performance," deals with various media, but has only one paper (Bucholtz and Lopez) that focuses on film. The 2012 Multilingua double special issue, in contrast, takes as a title: "language and society in cinematic discourse," and explicitly notes that it is an "under-examined" area for sociolinguistic inquiry.

The guest editor for this special issue and the general editor of Post Script anticipate the articles included in this special issue will stimulate more interest in this "under-examined" area of study.  Papers are invited that are written to be accessible to film scholars and a general humanities audience, illustrating a particular approach but ideally incorporating multimodality.  The following are suggestions for possible areas of focus, but contributors are not limited to these areas:


*         discourse/conversation-analytic approaches to close analyses of key episodes of dialogue

*         ideological perspectives on the use of language varieties

*         analyses of the deployment of more than one language in a film

*         corpus-linguistic approaches to cinematic discourse, for example to identifying style

*         analyses of the linguistic representation of gender, ethnicity, or race

*         investigations of the achievement of linguistic "authenticity"

*         pragmatic-theoretical approaches to understanding interaction

*         explorations of issues of translation in relation to multimodal cinematic discourse

                Please note that Post Script does not reprint previously published material.

Submit manuscripts via a virus-free attachment, with author identification on a separate page and not in the headers, by e-mail to guest editor Catherine Davies at the address below by October 1, 2015. Manuscripts must be in English.

Professor Catherine Evans Davies
Professor of Linguistics
Department of English, Box 870244
University of Alabama
Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0244
Email: cdavies at as.ua.edu<mailto:cdavies at as.ua.edu>

For questions about Post Script not related to this special issue, contact the general editor: Professor Gerald Duchovnay <Gerald.Duchovnay at tamuc.edu<mailto:Gerald.Duchovnay at tamuc.edu>>



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