An ELF Phonopragmatic Approach to the Analysis of 'Migration Movies' in Pedagogic Contexts: Linguacultural Dimensions of Scripted Interactions

This paper introduces a novel phonopragmatic approach to the analysis of a corpus of ‘migration movies’ employed as teaching material in university courses of ELF for intercultural mediators. The pragmatic implications of the dialogic cues by a number of ELF-speaking characters in films will be explored both qualitatively, in terms of conversation moves and acts occurring within specific contexts of intercul- tural communication, and quantitatively, through a phonopragmatic investigation of the acoustic analysis of speech, and of the phonological segmentation into intonation units and acoustic variations. The objective is to investigate the extent to which the illocutionary and perlocutionary dimensions of the movie interactions can actually find cross-cultural ‘phonopragmatic’ realizations accounting for linguacultural differences in the expression and recognition of conversational presuppositions in the different ELF varieties used by the characters in the selected movies. More specifically, some new moves and acts will be identified to justify cross-cultural miscommunication due to semantic inaccessibility and cultural unavailability in ELF interactions, together with their phonopragmatic realizations in conversation which are here explored by applying a number of prosodic parameters aimed at cue disambiguation in different ELF varieties, such as: vowel sounds in different morpho-syntactic positions and their duration; pitch and duration of tonic syllables and of syllables preceding syntactic boundaries; pause duration at phrase boundaries and their influence on syllabic duration. The relevance of this approach to the teaching of ELF to intercultural mediators will also be discussed.