“Aproximaciones a la oralidad en el texto audiovisual”

Colloquial language, as defined by Beinhauer (1973: 9), is “speech such as springs natu-rally and spontaneously in daily conversation”. In the case of a screenplay –that is, a text writ-ten to be spoken (Chaume 2004) –, we are faced with the need to provide a credible representation of living conver-sational language. This essay focuses on the characteristics of oral discourse in the language of fiction on the basis of a corpus of excerpts from six Spanish films. Its aim is to identify the most important features of oral language in the audiovisual text. The essay’s working hypothesis will be to verify whether the selected samples reflect the features of so-called ‘prototypical oral discourse’ (Briz 1995). The samples are taken from the following films by Almodóvar: What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984); Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), The Flower of My Secret (1995), Talk to Her (2002), Volver (2006) and Broken Em-braces (2009). This director was chosen in view of the function of the language used by his char-acters, characterized by an informal tone in which colloqui-al elements are theoretically prevalent.