The Representation of the WWI Soldier in Audiovisuals

The present project seeks to analyse the audiovisual (AV) representation of the World War One (WWI) British soldier. Since the origins of sound cinema, directors took pains to characterise soldiers and their language, to convey a sense of realism. The existence of a specific set of lexical elements, called Trench Talk or Trench Slang, was emphasised by studies on the language used by British soldiers during WWI (Doyle and Walker, 2021; Walker, 2017; Winkowski, 2017). This slang covered a wide range of semantic fields and was widely used by soldiers in their daily life in the trenches. In this study, Trench Talk is taken as a fully developed register, in accordance with works by Agha (2003) on the notion of enregisterment. Its presence and function in films and series set during the conflict is analysed using studies on AV fiction dialogue (such as Kozloff, 2000). The corpus of AV material taken into consideration is divided into two time periods: the first part includes films produced from the 1930s to 1960, when a direct experience of the conflict was still present; the second part is composed of films from 1960 up to the present and is more related to a post-memorial form of representation. Both parts are composed of 10-12 titles each. This work aims at pinpointing how Trench Talk is used to fictionally represent soldiers in the material taken into consideration, and if its use is consistent through the decades or, if it varies, to what degree both in qualitative and quantitative terms. Expected results are that the use of trench language will not be entirely consistent, as social conventions, as well as cultural representation of WWI, changed through the time, thus influencing the choice of the features represented.