They are what they talk. The verbal representation of children and adolescents in Italian cinema

Abstract

This paper seeks to contribute to an ongoing debate about the centrality and the agency that is recently being attributed to children in films and to demonstrate that the locus of such changed representation is in the new discourse opportunities with which children are endowed. This study belongs to the domain of the linguistic stylistics of cinema and its main objective is to devote attention to the verbal plane of film generally overlooked by media studies scholars as well as linguists. In consideration of the particular context in which it is hosted, an issue of an academic journal promoting scholarly research in Italian literature, the arts and culture, this study also intends to show how text linguistics can contribute to literary or film studies scholarship thus pointing in the direction of a fruitful interdisciplinary cooperation between these research domains.