Studying TV narratives and characters - a corpus linguistic approach
Monika Bednarek
Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney
This talk introduces a new corpus of dialogue from 66 US TV series, the Sydney Corpus of Television Dialogue (SydTV) - now available for other researchers (see http://www.syd-tv.com/). The talk first discusses methodological issues around corpus building and then presents a case study on stigmatised language. I focus on ain't and its co-occurring words (collocates), as well as its potential association with social character categories such as ethnicity and class. The study incorporates additional insights from interviews with TV screenwriters, and from a questionnaire with German university students about their consumption of English-language series. The talk will therefore touch on matters of interest to corpus linguists, sociolinguists, critical discourse analysts, applied linguists, and stylisticians.
Further details about the Sydney Corpus of Television Dialogue can be found by clicking here.