Language and Television Series A Linguistic Approach to TV Dialogue

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.

Monika Bednarek is Associate Professor in Linguistics at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is the author of five books including The Discourse of New Values (2017) and The Language of Fictional Television (2010). She is co-editor of the international, peer-reviewed journal Functions of Language.