All the films selected for this project can be borrowed from the UNT Media Library or the Foreign Language Learning Center with a valid UNT student ID card. Many of them can also be rented from video stores in the U.S.
For each film, there is a set of questions that can be answered during or after viewing the film. Selected scenes have been transcribed in the "normal" alphabet, and there are also phonetic transcriptions of some of these scenes. The questions are somewhat different for each film, but they all cover cultural and linguistic topics of interest.
The primary focus of this project is to draw attention to linguistic variation. For example, second-person French pronouns (tu and vous) are used in different ways in French, which is not like English, even though there are some variants of you (e.g., yous, y'all, you'uns, and perhaps others). Spoken, conversational French is also different from written formal or academic French since speaking often involves deleting or "sliding over" or not taking the time to pronounce things as if they were being read. You will notice in some of the transcribed scenes that the transcription in the "normal" alphabet doesn't exactly match what is found in the phonetic transcription. This is because the transcriptions with the "regular" alphabet have complete words so that it is easy to figure out what the words are. In the phonetic transcriptions, many sounds might not be reproduced because they were not pronounced by the actors in the films. Occasionally, you'll see an alternate pronunciation in parentheses in the transcriptions, but this was only done a few times.
Variation is an important part of linguistics, and it is the focus of the work of many people in the fields of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis. It is also important in the fields of second language acquisition and foreign language education because learners often have a great deal of difficulty figuring out which words, structures, or pronunciations are formal or informal, for example, and which ones can be used in which contexts. For this reason, you should always pay special attention to the context of any scene you decide to analyze. Factors such as age, social class, setting, power, hierarchical relations, and expected behavior are very important. They affect language use and variation quite a bit, which is something you probably already know, but you don't necessarily think about it every day while you're using English or whatever your native language might be.
As you view these films or any other films (in any language), try to think of variation on two levels: 1) the same person in different communicative contexts and 2) the communicative patterns, rules, systems, and constraints of specific contexts in different cultures or regions.
Please contact me if you have any questions or comments regarding this project.
Lawrence Williams
Assistant Professor of French
Director of Curriculum & Assessment
Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures
University of North Texas
(940) 565-2404