What Film Translation can Tell us About the Creation of Meaning, the Role of Accents and Gestures – A Few Essayistic Remarks About Multimodality

Abstract

Abstract This article aims to illustrate some aspects of film dubbing that are of interest to research in cognition and in particular to cognitive linguistics. Dubbed films contain unavoidable discrepancies between the lip movements and (other) gestures perceived visually and the sounds that are heard. Widening the scope to the issue of different accents of speakers, it is argued that multimodal construction grammar should investigate all modes of meaningful communicative behavior but that this does not necessarily imply the postulation of multimodal constructions as such.