Language and Television Series: A Linguistic Approach to TV Dialogue

This book provides a comprehensive linguistic analysis of contemporary US television series, combining linguistic analysis of the Sydney Corpus of Television Dialogue with scriptwriting manuals, interviews with Hollywood scriptwriters, and a survey with university students. It offers five new empirical studies with an applied linguistic lens on TV series, drawing from media linguistics, corpus linguistics, and sociocultural linguistics.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 318 pages
Publication date: 04 October 2018
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

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.

Weight: 462g
Dimension: 153 x 227 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781108459150