Interpreting Events: Scene Descriptions for Blind Audiences

The goal of the project is to analyse audio description of films to reveal how humans perceive and categorize events and movements. In the analysis, we apply the theoretical framework of conceptual spaces. Audio description helps us to study how events are segmented, how they are structured semantically, and how they are described.

Following questions are addressed: Which of the event borders and event shifts are explicitly verbalised by the interpreter/audio describer and which are not? Which aspects of a visual event are coded in the rapid real time spoken language descriptions formulated by the audio describers during a cinema performance? Which aspects of an action are verbally in focus most of the time?