A (in)existência de neutralidade. Um estudo de caso baseado em corpus com roteiros de audiodescrições francesas de filmes via teoria da avaliatividade

This article reports on a descriptive study that dealt with audio description, a branch of accessible audiovisual translation involved in the socio-cultural accessibility of the blind and visually impaired, and the register “AD script of feature films”, aimed at investigating, via corpus linguistics, the presence-absence of neutrality through appraisal theory-systemic-functional linguistics. The corpus was divided into two subcorpora, each of which containing an AD script written by the same French audio describer: “Intouchables” (C1)-“Minuit à Paris” (C2). Seven tags were made up for each subcorpus via the terms/choices within the systems of the appraisal network up to the second delicacy level, the tags were inserted, and the compiled subcorpora were treated by the WordList and Concord tools on Word Smith Tools. The results evidenced the nonexistence of neutrality as the scripts are evaluative/interpretative from the perspectives of “attitude”+its three types, “engagement”+its two types, and “graduation”+its two types, having indicated a tendency of an evaluative pattern characterized by the predominance of “graduation”-“force” and “attitude”-“appreciation”. CL was vital for the study’s success as it made feasible the insertion of 14 tags derived from 10 evaluative terms/choices in 10,387 words (C1+C2), and an analysis with 2,422 taggings. Based on these results, we suggest other studies: (i) description of the audio describer’s evaluative signature via a corpus with more AD scripts of feature films written by her, and (ii) description of the evaluative style of the register “AD script of feature films” via a corpus with AD scripts of the same French feature film, written by different audio describers.