Publications

Publication details [#57284]

Forchini, Pierfranca. 2013. Using movie corpora to explore spoken American English. Evidence from multi-dimensional analysis. In Bamford, Julia, Giuliana Diani and Silvia Cavalieri, eds. Variation and Change in Spoken and Written Discourse. Perspectives from corpus linguistics. (Dialogue Studies 21). John Benjamins. pp. 123–136.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins

Annotation

Face-to-face and movie conversation are usually claimed to differ: the first is often described as the quintessence of spontaneity, whereas the second as the quintessence of artificiality. In fact, there are few empirical studies that demonstrate this and, in spite of what is generally maintained by the literature, empirical data, which are investigated here by applying Biber’s (1988) Multi-Dimensional approach, prove that the involved production typical of face-to-face conversation also characterizes movie conversation. This resemblance has interesting implications for the teaching of spoken discourse, as movies may be effectively used as a valid source of material. The present research also illustrates an experiment with 3rd year Italian students of English that proves this potentiality especially in the learning of elisions, blends, repetitions, false starts, reformulations, discourse markers, and interjections.