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

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.

This book explores how television series can be understood as a form of literature, bridging the gap between literary and television studies. It goes beyond existing adaptation studies and narratological approaches to television series in both its scope and depth. The respective chapters address literary works, themes, tropes, techniques, values, genres, and movements in relation to a broad variety of television series, while drawing on the theoretical work of a host of scholars from Simone de Beauvoir and Yuri Lotman to Ted Nannicelli and Jason Mittel, and on critical approaches ranging from narratology and semiotics to empirical sociology and phenomenology. The book fosters new ways of understanding television series and literature and lays the groundwork for future scholarship in a number of fields. By questioning the alleged divide between television series and works of literature, it contributes not only to a better understanding of television series and literary texts themselves, but also to the development of interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities.

This cutting-edge collection of articles provides the first organised reflection on the language of films and television series across British, American and Italian cultures. The volume suggests new directions for research and applications, and offers a variety of methodologies and perspectives on the complexities of "telecinematic" discourse – a hitherto virtually unexplored area of investigation in linguistics. The papers share a common vision of the big and small screen: the belief that the discourses of film and television offer a re-presentation of our world. As such, telecinematic texts reorganise and recreate language (together with time and space) in their own way and with respect to specific socio-cultural conventions and media logic. The volume provides a multifaceted, yet coherent insight into the diegetic – as it revolves around narrative – as opposed to mimetic – as referring to other non-narrative and non-fictional genres – discourses of fictional media. The collection will be of interest to researchers, tutors and students in pragmatics, stylistics, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, communication studies and related fields.

With cases studies used throughout to help illustrate the more general points, this is an analysis of the most important characteristics of television dialogue, with a focus on fictional television. The book illustrates how we can fruitfully and systematically analyse the language of television.

This book explores a virtually untapped, yet fascinating research area: television dialogue. It reports on a study comparing the language of the American situation comedy Friends to natural conversation. Transcripts of the television show and the American English conversation portion of the Longman Grammar Corpus provide the data for this corpus-based investigation, which combines Douglas Biber’s multidimensional methodology with a frequency-based analysis of close to 100 linguistic features. As a natural offshoot of the research design, this study offers a comprehensive description of the most common linguistic features characterizing natural conversation. Illustrated with numerous dialogue extracts from Friends and conversation, topics such as vague, emotional, and informal language are discussed. This book will be an important resource not only for researchers and students specializing in discourse analysis, register variation, and corpus linguistics, but also anyone interested in conversational language and television dialogue.

Television series are regarded as significant works of popular culture in today's society, which explains the increasing demand to translate them into other languages to reach larger audiences. This book focuses on one of the two most common modes of audiovisual translation for this type of product: subtitling. The naturalness that is expected in television dialogue together with the spoken-to-written medium conversion entailed in subtitling pose a challenge for professionals, who have been typically blamed for neutralising the source dialogue. Little to no empirical evidence, however, has been provided to effectively address this issue to date. This book offers a contrastive study of the American English television dialogue and the Castilian Spanish subtitles of three popular police procedurals: Castle (2009), Dexter (2006) and The Mentalist (2008). After introducing some basic notions to frame the study - such as translation norms, audiovisual text and fictive orality - more than twenty lexical and morphosyntactic features in the series are analysed from a qualitative and quantitative point of view. Throughout the chapters, a combination of corpus-based and corpus-driven methodologies are used to offer a sound, empirically grounded characterisation of the language employed in these audiovisual productions and their translations.