Based on the analysis of key words and trigrams, this paper explores characteristics of contemporary American English television dialogue. Using a corpus comprising dialogue from seven fictional series (five different genres) and the spoken part of the American National Corpus, key words and trigrams are compared to previous corpus linguistic studies of such dialogue (Mittmann 2006, Quaglio 2009) and further explored on the basis of concordances, with special emphasis on over-represented key words/trigrams and their potential to indicate informality and emotionality. The results suggest that the expression of emotion is a key defining feature of the language of television, cutting across individual series and different televisual genres.
2014. ‘And they all look just the same’? A quantitative survey of television title sequences. Visual Communication 13:2 ► pp. 125 ff.
Bednarek, Monika
2015. Corpus-Assisted Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Television and Film Narratives. In Corpora and Discourse Studies, ► pp. 63 ff.
Bednarek, Monika
2018. Language and Television Series,
Bednarek, Monika
2019. ‘Don’t say crap. Don’t use swear words.’ – Negotiating the use of swear/taboo words in the narrative mass media. Discourse, Context & Media 29 ► pp. 100293 ff.
2022. What’s up, Doc? Views of Healthcare Professionals on Medical Scenes in Television Series. ILCEA :47
Etayo, Cristina, Nuno José Lopes & Elana E. Nichols
2023. What affects perceived quality? An examination of television fiction series. El Profesional de la información
Flesch, Marie
2023. “Dude” and “Dudette”, “Bro” and “Sis”: A Diachronic Study of Four Address Terms in the TV Corpus. Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies :32/2 ► pp. 23 ff.
2022. The pragmatic functions of tu and lei in films: Converging patterns of address across translated and original Italian dialogue. Journal of Pragmatics 201 ► pp. 15 ff.
Fägersten, Kristy Beers & Monika Bednarek
2022. The evolution of swearing in television catchphrases. Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 31:2 ► pp. 196 ff.
Ghia, Elisa
2019. (Dis)aligning across different linguacultures: Pragmatic questions from original to dubbed film dialogue
. Multilingua 38:5 ► pp. 583 ff.
2016. Adjacency Pairs in The Big Bang Theory: Breaches of Sequential Normativity in TV Sitcoms. Discourse and Cognition 23:2 ► pp. 81 ff.
Landert, Daniela
2021. The spontaneous co-creation of comedy: Humour in improvised theatrical fiction. Journal of Pragmatics 173 ► pp. 68 ff.
McIntyre, Dan
2013. The year’s work in stylistics 2012. Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 22:4 ► pp. 333 ff.
MinDeokGi, 심규남 & Lee Seung Min
2012. Forms and structures of n-grams in English corpora for elementary school students. Journal of the Korea English Education Society 11:3 ► pp. 39 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 february 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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