Language and Television Series
A Linguistic Approach to TV Dialogue

Explores contemporary US television dialogue - the on-screen language that viewers worldwide encounter as they watch popular television series.

Monika Bednarek (Author)

9781108472227, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 October 2018

318 pages, 40 b/w illus. 36 tables
23.5 x 15.1 x 2.1 cm, 0.57 kg

This book offers a comprehensive linguistic analysis of contemporary US television series. Adopting an interdisciplinary and multimethodological approach, Monika Bednarek brings together linguistic analysis of the Sydney Corpus of Television Dialogue with analysis of scriptwriting manuals, interviews with Hollywood scriptwriters, and a survey undertaken with university students about their consumption of TV series. In so doing, she presents five new and original empirical studies. The focus on language use in a professional context (the television industry), on scriptwriting pedagogy, and on learning and teaching provides an applied linguistic lens on TV series. This is complemented by perspectives taken from media linguistics, corpus linguistics and sociocultural linguistics/sociolinguistics. Throughout the book, multiple dialogue extracts are presented from a wide variety of well-known fictional television series, including The Big Bang Theory, Grey's Anatomy and Bones. Researchers in applied linguistics, discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics and media linguistics will find the book both stimulating and unique in its approach.

Part I. Introduction: 1. Television dialogue
2. Linguistic approaches to telecinematic discourse
Part II. A Functional Approach to Television Series (FATS): 3. Functions relating to the communication of the narrative
4. Other functions of TV dialogue
Part III. Data and Approaches: 5. Corpora and corpus linguistic methods
6. Other approaches
Part IV. Analyses of SydTV: 7. Salient features of TV dialogue: a corpus linguistic approach
8. Key words, variation, and further insights into TV dialogue
9. Non-codified language in SydTV
Part V. TV Dialogue in Pedagogy: 10. 'Take that pencil and just GO!': TV series and scriptwriting pedagogy
11. Consuming television dialogue: a case study of advanced learners in Germany
Part VI. Conclusion: 12. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Bilingualism & multilingualism [CFDM], Language acquisition [CFDC], Sociolinguistics [CFB]