So far the pragmatics of AVT have attracted very little attention from specialists in the field. This presentation focuses on the communicative phenomenon of implicature and reports on a study of the reception of implied meaning in the multimodal, cross-cultural environment of subtitled film. Acknowledging the salience of linguistic indirectness in real, face-to-face interaction as well as in film dialogue, this paper aims to shed some light on the comprehension of implicatures by British and Greek viewers of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004). In doing so, this presentation brings into sharp relief the key role that reception studies are bound to play in the future development of AVT, as recognised by a number of scholars in the field.
The presentation begins by fleshing out the contribution of reception studies to my study of implicatures, which takes the form of an empirical investigation into how implied meaning is understood by both source viewers and target viewers. In preparation for the experimental testing of implicature recovery by actual audiences it was necessary to (a) identify the contribution of both verbal and non-verbal semiotic resources to the construal of implicatures by the filmmakers, (b) conduct a pragmatic analysis of the utterances evoking implicatures the light of Relevance Theory (Wilson & Sperber, 2004) and (c) compare source text and target text in terms of their constitutive implicatures and explicatures. The experimental component complements this methodological framework by testing the analysts’ (and where applicable, the filmmakers’) hypotheses pertaining to the understanding of implicatures by source audiences and target audiences.
The experimental data set consists of the responses given by British and Greek viewers in questionnaires intended to measure their comprehension of 21 cases of implicature identified in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. All of them are instances of zero or partial implicature explicitation in the subtitles.
Specifically, the paper seeks to address the following questions:
1. To what extent were the source audiences and target audiences able to work out the implicatures that the filmmakers intended to communicate?
2. To what extent was the Greek audience’s comprehension of implicatures similar to that of the British viewers?
3. What was the contribution of non-verbal semiotic resources to implicature comprehension by the two audiences?
Particular emphasis is laid upon implicatures whose recovery presupposes familiarity with specific aspects of British culture, which, as predicted, were among the most challenging for the Greek audience.