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.
Author(s): Paulo Quaglio
Year: 2009
Language: English
Pages: 176
Television Dialogue......Page 2
Editorial page
......Page 3
Title page
......Page 4
LCC data
......Page 5
Table of contents......Page 6
List of tables......Page 10
List of figures......Page 12
Foreword to the book......Page 14
1.1 Introduction: What this book is about......Page 16
1.2 What this book is not about......Page 18
1.3 Conversation studies......Page 20
1.3.1 The discourse circumstances of conversation......Page 21
1.4.1 Television dialogue......Page 25
1.5 Why study the language of Friends?......Page 27
1.6 Summary......Page 28
1.7 Overview of the book......Page 29
2.2 The main characters......Page 32
2.2.1 The individual characters......Page 33
2.3 Summary......Page 41
3.2 The data......Page 44
3.2.1 The Friends corpus: Composition......Page 45
3.2.2 The Friends corpus: Settings and interactions......Page 46
3.2.3 The Conversation Corpus: Composition......Page 51
3.2.4 The American Conversation Subcorpus......Page 52
3.2.5.1 Casual Conversations......Page 54
3.2.5.2 Task-Related, Service Encounters, and Casual Conversations......Page 58
3.2.5.3 Texts with Phone conversations and casual conversations......Page 60
3.2.5.4 Texts with work-related conversations......Page 61
3.3 Settings and interactions: Friends versus conversation......Page 62
3.4 Data Coding and concordancing......Page 63
3.6 Statistical significance......Page 66
3.7 Functional Differences......Page 68
3.9 Summary......Page 69
4.1 Introduction......Page 72
4.2 Multidimensional analysis: A brief introduction......Page 73
4.3 Results of Biber's (1988) MD Analysis......Page 74
4.4 The MD Analysis of Friends......Page 80
4.5 Summary......Page 84
5.1 Introduction......Page 86
5.2 The linguistic expression of vagueness......Page 87
5.2.1 Hedges, Vague Coordination Tags, and Nouns of Vague Reference......Page 89
5.2.2 Discourse markers you know and I mean......Page 94
5.2.3 Stance markers probably, perhaps, and maybe......Page 97
5.2.4 Modal verbs might and could......Page 98
5.2.6 Utterance final so......Page 100
5.3 Summary......Page 101
6.1 Introduction......Page 102
6.2 The linguistic expression of emotion/emphatic content......Page 104
6.2.1 Adverbial intensifiers......Page 106
6.2.2 Discourse markers oh, wow and stance marker of course......Page 109
6.2.3 Copular verbs look, feel, and sound......Page 111
6.2.5 All (+ adjective/gerund) and totally (emphatic agreement)......Page 113
6.2.6 Lexical bundles I can't believe (+ complements) and thank you so much......Page 114
6.2.7 Expletives and slang terms......Page 116
6.2.8 Non-minimal Responses Sure, Wow, and Fine......Page 119
6.3 Summary......Page 120
7.1 Introduction......Page 122
7.2 The Linguistic Expression of Informality......Page 123
7.2.1 Expletives......Page 124
7.2.2 Slang Terms......Page 126
7.2.3 Vocatives (Familiarizers)......Page 128
7.2.4 Informal greetings and leave-takings......Page 130
7.2.5 Linguistic innovations......Page 131
7.2.7 Repeats......Page 133
7.3 Summary......Page 135
8.1 Introduction......Page 138
8.2 Narrative discourse......Page 139
8.2.1 The linguistic expression of narrativeness......Page 141
8.3 The discourse immediacy of Friends......Page 147
8.4 Summary......Page 151
That's a wrap......Page 154
9.1 Linguistic similarities......Page 155
9.2 Vague language......Page 156
9.3 Emotional language......Page 157
9.4 Informal language......Page 158
9.5 Degrees of Narrativeness......Page 160
9.6 Restrictions and/or influences of the televised medium......Page 162
9.7 Implications and applications......Page 163
9.8 Final remarks......Page 165
References......Page 166
Appendix......Page 172
Name index......Page 178
Subject index......Page 180
The series Studies in Corpus Linguistics (SCL)......Page 182
