The sociolinguistic construction of character diversity in fictional television series
Susan Reichelt
CASS, Lancaster University
This talk reports on a study investigating the language used in six fictional television series (1997 - 2014) and produces a useful account of the underused fictolinguistic approach that links concepts of Variationist Sociolinguistics with scripted contexts.
I will address the construction of the television dialogue corpus, the quantitative methods involved in the analysis, and, finally, the findings of how linguistic patterns contribute to distinguishing features of characters and character groups. In that, I will focus on three main points:
1. individual linguistic variables and how they are used for purposes of characterization
2. linguistic variables that contribute to character styles
3. the interaction of linguistic variables across characters and series
Through quantitative analysis and informed by previous sociolinguistic findings on the uses of five pragmatic forms (pragmatic markers, hedges, general extenders, modal adverbs, and intensifiers), I trace how language variation and change ties in with the individualization of fictional characters.
Findings suggest that linguistic patterns that link to character qualities are consistent across a variety of investigated features. Further, some features (e.g. pragmatic markers) appear to be used with greater variance than others (e.g. general extenders), suggesting that there are distinctions in terms of saliency and availability of characterization cues.
Further findings show linguistic variation correlating to particular character types, series production and genre, and character background (in particular nationality). Linguistic change is investigated through apparent time analyses for all features, as well as a brief real time analysis for selected contexts.