We are very pleased to announce the print publication of a special issue of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics (IJCL) on “Corpus approaches to telecinematic language”, guest edited by Monika Bednarek, Valentin Werner and Marcia Veirano Pinto.
The articles in this special issue share a common focus on analysing language use in film/television per se, rather than comparing it to unscripted data, and are also united by their common use of corpora and corpus linguistic techniques.
In addition to explaining the building of recent large relevant corpora and illustrating their uses, this issue showcases original research that explores telecinematic discourse from interdisciplinary perspectives (within linguistics), fruitfully combining corpus linguistics with other approaches such as diachronic research, register studies, and sociolinguistics (see also this corpus-driven sociolinguistic study of a television drama published in a previous issue of IJCL). A wide range of linguistic features are examined by these authors, including emotional language, informal language, and linguistic innovation:
Mark Davies’ study details the rationale, design, creation and use of the Movie Corpus, and the TV Corpus. Sources, issues, and solutions related to text collection and corpus building are comprehensively described, as is the nature of the texts and the metadata available in both corpora.
Valentin Werner’s article uses these corpora to look at variation in emotionality and informality in the language of films and television series. Findings suggest that telecinematic language is complex and marked by areas of dynamicity and stability, and that labels such as ‘telecinematic discourse’ or ‘telecinematic language’ seem to be warranted to describe the language of both fictional television series and films, despite language-external differences.
Eniko Csomay and Ryan Young also take a diachronic perspective, carrying out a keyword analysis of The Original Series, The Next Generation and Deep Space 9 series of Star Trek. The authors look at the aboutness and style of these three series to find shifts and developments in storylines, plots, and the dialogues of male and female characters across the years.
Susan Reichelt’s paper examines marked affixation as a possible cue for characterisation in scripted television dialogue and particularly in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It uses Mark Davies’ TV Corpus to quantify the innovative use of affixes in word-formation processes in television series and then focuses on their use in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Finally, Tony Berber Sardinha and Marcia Veirano Pinto’s article presents a text typology of American television derived from a multi-dimensional analysis of their own USTV corpus. The typology comprises nine different text types, namely Presentation of information, Opinion and discussion, Analysis and debate, Description, Interactive recount, Engaging demonstration, Playful discourse, Simplified interaction, and Simulated conversation.
With this special issue, we intend to highlight the specific potential that corpus approaches offer for the linguistic study of telecinematic discourse from various angles with the aim of gaining insights into the structure and usage of scripted mediated language. The editors hope the issue is useful to corpus linguists and all others who study language use in film and television, whether for research or teaching. If you are interested in the language of television series, you can also access the Sydney Corpus of Television Dialogue here: https://cqpw-prod.vip.sydney.edu.au/CQPweb/ .