This book is a thorough quantitative and qualitative study of a typical phenomenon pertaining to the English spoken language; namely question tags (QTs) and invariant tags. More specifically, English tags are analysed on the syntactic, pragmatic and prosodic level, taking into account cross-varietal differences as well as both visual and auditory dimensions, in order to get a more precise interpretation of their communicative functions. This is made possible by examining film language, since films, being complex semiotic “texts”, provide a more complete set of parameters for analysis, especially in the case of QTs, where intonation is crucial for their interpretation. The study of their function is based not only on their formal properties, but is integrated with the use of spectrograms, which makes it possible to actually “visualise” the prosody of tags and to back up the results with material evidence. Moreover, tags are also examined from a translational perspective, with analysis focusing on the transposition of tags in Italian dubbing, a specific type of audiovisual translation, for two main reasons: firstly, to check how and to what extent tags are rendered in Italian, a language which does not have so structured a set of equivalent expressions, and secondly, to see how much space they are granted in a typically “constrained” translation like dubbing, which is severely influenced by the visual dimension. After this, the use of the various translating options in Italian dubbing is studied in Italian original film language and compared with spontaneous conversation in both languages, by analysing data in corpora of spontaneous speech both in English and Italian to ascertain whether the use of tags and their Italian counterparts in film language is natural or artificial. The present work is the first to study the syntactic and prosodic properties of English tags from an integrated pragmatic and translational perspective. The study also qualifies as contrastive in that the use of these conversational routines is analysed in two different languages (English and Italian), as well as in different genres and varieties, including film language, dubbese and spontaneous speech.

The two-volume set, LNCS 14146 and 14147 constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, DEXA 2023, held in Penang, Malaysia, in August 2023. The 49 full papers presented together with 35 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 155 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections as follows: Part I: Data modeling; database design; query optimization; knowledge representation; Part II: Rule-based systems; natural language processing; deep learning; neural networks.

Since the first groundbreaking edition of Developments in Pressure-Sensitive Products was introduced in 1998, heavy research has resulted in substantial progress in the field. Fully updated and expanded to reflect this activity, Developments in Pressure-Sensitive Products, Second Edition provides a detailed overview of the entire range of pressure-

Though often defined as having opposite aims, means, and effects, modernism and modern propaganda developed at the same time and influenced each other in surprising ways. The professional propagandist emerged as one kind of information specialist, the modernist writer as another. Britain was particularly important to this double history. By secretly hiring well-known writers and intellectuals to write for the government and by exploiting their control of new global information systems, the British in World War I invented a new template for the manipulation of information that remains with us to this day. Making a persuasive case for the importance of understanding modernism in the context of the history of modern propaganda, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda also helps explain the origins of today's highly propagandized world. Modernism, Media, and Propaganda integrates new archival research with fresh interpretations of British fiction and film to provide a comprehensive cultural history of the relationship between modernism and propaganda in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. From works by Joseph Conrad to propaganda films by Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, Mark Wollaeger traces the transition from literary to cinematic propaganda while offering compelling close readings of major fiction by Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, and James Joyce.

This text provides a comparative analysis of how the war has been remembered in film. It looks at how national cinemas were mobilised as part of the war effort and how, subsequently, film makers shaped the memory and legacy of the war in later years.