Louisa Desilla’s research while affiliated with Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and other places

The present work is a handbook prepared for Community Interpreting trainees within the context of the PLOUTOS project, funded by the EU.

The present study explores how the COVID-19 pandemic has shaped the linguistic patterns found in computed-mediated discourse, drawing on a corpus of emails written by university students and addressing their lecturers. The analysis shows that affect is a key component of the new stylistic practice that has emerged in email discourse during the pandemic and reveals the ways in which manifestations of empathy are linked to politeness strategies. The first part of the analysis targets lexical and grammatical features/structures that refer to the pandemic and well-being and display affect in email discourse, and it establishes a link between this stylistic practice and dominant public discourses about the pandemic. The second part of the analysis zooms in on a particular aspect of affect, i.e., empathy, and examines pertinent politeness strategies used by students. Moreover, an attempt is made to shed some light on the potential interplay between empathy, vulnerability, and politeness.

This article examines the construal, cross-cultural relay and comprehension of misunderstandings by filmmakers, translators and audiences respectively of Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004). It reports on findings of a case-study on implicatures in these two romantic comedies (Desilla 2009/2012/2014). Both genuine and feigned misunderstandings are found in the two films. Inter alia , the analysis will show that misunderstandings can serve comedic and/or narrative functions, the latter pertaining to both characterisation and, more crucially, plot advancement. It is also demonstrated how misunderstandings can permeate only a single layer or both layers of film communication.

Exploring the synergies between audiovisual translation, cognitive (experimental) pragmatics and film studies, the present article proposes a novel approach to the empirical investigation of audience reception. The proposed methodology is applied to a study on the comprehension of implicatures by British and Greek viewers in the two Bridget Jones films Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) and their subtitled versions. Inter alia, it is demonstrated that implicatures whose understanding presupposes familiarity with specific aspects of the British culture presented the Greek audience with substantial difficulties. Overall, experimental data analysis shows that source and target viewers did not always understand implicatures in the way the filmmakers would like them to and/or the analyst had predicted. This finding highlights the subjectivity and creativity of audience response and, therefore, the need regularly to corroborate research hypotheses through studies of actual audiences.

Drawing on insights from relevance theory, film studies, and multimodality, this paper offers a study of implicature in the polysemiotic context of films. A cognitive-pragmatic definition of implicature is proposed where relevance-theoretic concepts are adapted accordingly to cater for the semiotic complexity of film communication. The present case-study explores the construal and functions of the implicatures identified in Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004). It is demonstrated that implicatures are not conveyed by the film dialogue alone but, rather, via the co-deployment of verbal and non-verbal cinematic signifiers. Implicatures in the two romantic comedies have been found to fulfill comedic and/or narrative functions in tandem with mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and/or non-verbal soundtrack. In particular, implicatures emerge as an organic element of the two films because of their multifaceted contribution to the creation of humour, intimacy between the protagonists and plot per se.