Project ideas

Here are some ideas for linguistic research projects on TV dialogue (using SydTV or other corpora):

  • Comparison of TV dialogue with other types of constructed dialogue (dialogue in films, plays, novels…)
  • Analysis of linguistic features that are underrepresented in TV dialogue compared to unscripted American English (for example, ‘negative’ key words and n-grams)
  • In-depth analysis of particular linguistic features (phraseologies, usage)
  • Analysis of instances of double-voicing (crossing, stylization)
  • Analysis of non-codified language beyond lexis
  • Comparison of TV dialogue over time (diachronic analysis)
  • Comparison of dialogue in ‘quality’ TV series with dialogue in ‘mainstream’ series
  • Analysis of genre variation
  • Analysis of how dialogue contributes to plot development, including narrative causality (for example, how dialogue contributes to narrative elements such as appointments, deadlines, dangling causes, narrative statements, and narrative enigmas – see Thompson 2003, Mittell 2015)
  • Case studies on linguistic stereotypes and ideologies in particular series

Here are some ideas for research projects on ‘the linguistics of screenwriting’ (Bednarek 2015):

  • Analysis of the linguistic practices at work in writers’ rooms
  • Linguistic analysis of key production texts (pitches, treatments, bibles, etc.)
  • Linguistic analysis of the different elements of scripts
  • Comparison of different versions of TV scripts used in various development phases
  • Comparison of dialogue-as-scripted with dialogue-as-performed or dialogue-as-broadcast

References

Bednarek, M. 2015. An overview of the linguistics of screenwriting and its interdisciplinary connections, with special focus on dialogue in episodic television. Journal of Screenwriting 6/2 (special issue on writing for television): 221-238.

Mittell, J. 2015. Complex TV. The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling, New York/London: New York University Press.

Thompson, K. 2003. Storytelling in Film and Television, Cambridge, M.A./London: Harvard University Press.