Discursive and Pragmatic Paths Through the World of Jane Austen’s Emma

This article primarily aims at exploring innovative ways to approach Discourse Analysis in the classroom. By focussing on audio-visual material that intersemiotically translates a well-known literary text ( Jane Austen’s Emma, 1816 ), my paper suggests possible analyses and activities that might provide useful when introducing at least some of the disciplines comprised in Discourse Analysis. For reasons of space, the examples given are necessarily limited in number, and all deal with the strategies characterising Pragmatics and Conversational Analysis, in an attempt to find alternative and stimulating ways to introduce students to notions such as Face, Politeness and Cooperation amongst the many. From a didactic point of view, it is actually essential for students to realise that a theoretical approach to the study of language is a necessary step to fully understand (and learn) that same language. The notions of register, context, dialect etc., must thus be perceived not only as abstract ideas in search of a definition, but as very real elements that play a fundamental role in the real life of real speakers belonging to a different culture whose language we want to study. The choice of audio-visual material, then, stems precisely from the need to render these notions more real (hence more useful) to students of English, in order to help them appreciate the workings of such notions in practical contexts, thereby stimulating and encouraging their learning process. The analysis clearly might concentrate on many different elements, and the corpus should be selected in accordance to the focus of our investigation. For instance, our analysis might focus on issues of intersemiotic translation, bringing to the fore the strategies exploited in the adaptation of a written to a filmic text, interlinguistic translation (as with an analysis of dubbing, subtitling and/or translation of subtitles), as well all the aspects of language involved in a communicative exchange (turn-taking, indirect speech acts, use of idiomatic expressions and so on), while never underestimating the fundamental notions of culture and cultural translation that underlay any approach to a foreign language. The choices made in this paper are clearly very partial and my analysis is in no way exhaustive. Nonetheless, I hope this work succeeds in suggesting the innumerable lines of analysis and almost infinite applications that language studies might have in the life of our students.