Lay perceptions of historical English as portrayed in Roland Joffé's screen adaptation of the Scarlet Letter

Abstract

This paper takes as its object of analysis a cinematic adaptation of an American literary classic, i.e. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), from the point of view of language. The film under scrutiny is Roland Joffé’s free adaptation of Hawthorne’s novel (Joffé 1995). The present contribution suggests a different approach to the analysis of the language of period movies than one would typically adopt within the framework of dialectology. This perspective involves a paradigm shift from representation (objective) to perception (subjective): in particular I propose to focus on the metalinguistic discourse of film reviewers, both professionals and lay writers (writing for newspapers and blogs), with particular reference to their commentaries regarding linguistic phenomena in Joffé’s The Scarlet Letter, namely accent, socio-pragmatic features and verbal morphology.