Cross-linguistic dimensions of comparability in film dialogue

This paper examines original film dialogue from a cross-linguistic perspective. More specifically, the paper will identify and compare the most frequent 3-grams – i.e. 3-word clusters – in a corpus of original English and original Italian films. This will be done with the specific aim of exploring the dimensions of comparability between the language of English films and the language of Italian films. It will be shown that the dialogues of English and Italian films exhibit a pronounced degree of similarity not only in terms of their decidedly clausal ‘texture’ and markedly interactional focus but also at the level of individual 3-grams – namely the English I don’t know and the Italian non lo so, whose various functions will be described.