The experiential nature of ELF reformulations in the multimodal representations of modern and ancient sea-odysseys

Abstract

This chapter explores the latest stage of a research project carried out at the University of Salento, which aims to investigate the effects of emotions on the positive reconsideration of mass migrations and intercultural socialization. In particular, this study illustrates the linguistic and multimodal strategies of production of four videos that are informed by an unbiased discursive frame for the multimedia representations of sea-journeys. In these clips, the linguistic and audiovisual associations between samples of Western and Non-Western migration narratives are meant to assist viewers in acknowledging that travelers from past and present times experience shared emotions and feelings when leaving their native countries in search for better life conditions. The activation of this perlocutionary effect is pursued by means of hybridizations between written and oral accounts of sea-voyages and between ‘epic movie’, ‘mockumentary’ and ‘journalistic interview’ genres. Narrations are retextualized into ‘experiential reformulations’ that resort to modern variations of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in order to underline, through their structural and phonetic characteristics, the dramatic and life-threatening nature of migrations. The audiovisual composition mixes factual and cinematic properties so as to attract envisaged viewers’ attention and then induce, in them, the positive reconsideration of the objects of representation. After detailing the main phases of experiential reformulation and illustrating the multimodal composition of the four videos, this chapter comments on the results of a reception study of the multimedia research products, in order to enquire into the empirical reception of genre and text hybridization, as well as into the accessibility level of the ELF variations that represent the verbal dimension of the videos.