Article published in:
Dialogue across Media
Edited by Jarmila Mildorf and Bronwen Thomas
[Dialogue Studies 28] 2017
► pp. 37–54

Dialogue and character in 21st century TV drama

The case of ‘Sherlock Holmes’

The successful British-made TV drama series Sherlock (BBC 2011-present) is one of the latest in a long sequence of dramatisations of the Victorian short stories and novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This chapter discusses some passages of dialogue from the first episode of this series, demonstrating how the character is created and maintained, focusing in particular on Sherlock’s antisocial tendencies, his eccentricity and his remarkable deductive powers. The analysis further seeks to isolate the distinctive contribution of dialogue in this respect from other aspects of audiovisual production, drawing as appropriate on the sociolinguistics of stance, politeness theory and conversational analysis.
Published online: 19 January 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/ds.28.03ric
References

References

Androutsopoulos, Jannis
2012 Language and Society in Cinematic Discourse. Special issue of Multilingua – Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication 31: (2/3).Google Scholar
Bednarek, Monika
2012 The Language of Fictional Television: Drama and Identity. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
2011 Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson
1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Burton, Deirdre
1980 Dialogue and Discourse: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Modern Drama Dialogue and Naturally Occurring Conversation. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan
2001 Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar
Engebretson, Robert
2007 Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Grice, H. Paul
1975 “Logic and Conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics, III: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 41-58. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Herman, Vimala
1998 Dramatic Discourse: Dialogue as Interaction in Plays. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Jaffe, Alexandra
2009 Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kozloff, Sarah
2000 Overhearing Film Dialogue. University of California Press.Google Scholar
McIntyre, Dan
2008 “Integrating Multimodal Analysis and the Stylistics of Drama: A Multimodal Perspective on Ian McKellen’s Richard III.” Language and Literature, 17 (4): 309-334. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Richardson, Kay
2010 Television Dramatic Dialogue: A Sociolinguistic Study. New York: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson
1974 “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-taking for Conversation.” Language 50: 696–735. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Short, Mick
2002 “From Dramatic Text to Dramatic Performance.” In Exploring the Language of Drama: From Text to Context, ed. by Jonathan Culpeper, Mick Short, and Peter Verdonk, 6-18. London: Routledge.Google Scholar