Thesis title: The Representation of the World War One British Soldier in Audiovisual Dialogue: Linguistic, Social, and Cultural Functions of English Trench Slang
The First World War (WWI) was a massive historical phenomenon that marked the beginning of the 20th century, influencing numerous aspects of the national and international landscape. Entrenched soldiers experienced the most brutal and shocking aspect of this conflict, and their experience on the frontline is often remembered as inexpressible. Nonetheless, soldiers were already represented through various media while the conflict was still ongoing, and their fictional characterisation continued in the following years in films, books, comics, and so on. In particular, cinema had a pivotal role in supporting – and shaping – WWI soldiers’ remembrance for the following generations; this is achieved not only through their visual representation, but also through their linguistic one.
The present thesis analyses the linguistic representation of WWI soldiers in a corpus of audiovisual material containing titles from the beginning of sound cinema in the 1930s to nowadays. The study focuses on the so called ‘trench slang’ – an informal language related to soldiers’ life and professional skills in the trenches, rich of cultural connotations and nuances – and its use in fictional dialogue. Documentation of this slang such as specialised vocabularies, together with the theories on enregisterment and of communities of practice, are used as theoretical framework to identify trench slang as a linguistic phenomenon susceptible to replication in material such as films. Moreover, functional approaches to fictional dialogue are applied to shed light on the role of these historically connotated terms in soldiers’ linguistic representation.
In doing so, this work argues that trench slang played – and still plays – a significant role in the image of WWI soldier on screen, conveying values and ideas related to their experience on the front through decades of cinematic storytelling.