Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquium - Monika Bednarek (Corpus Linguistics): Language use in televisual narratives

This talk presents the first findings of salient language features in a new corpus (dataset) of dialogue transcribed from over 60 contemporary US television series: The Sydney Television Corpus (SydTV). SydTV is a small, specialised corpus which has been designed to be representative of the language variety of contemporary US American TV dialogue. Contemporary is here defined as the year of first broadcast falling between 2000 and 2012. This specific time frame was adopted because the first decade of the 21^st century was characterised by the global rise of American TV series, and the ‘golden age of television’ that characterises US TV series from this period is still on-going. US American is defined as having the United States as country of origin. TV dialogue is defined as the actual dialogue uttered by actors on screen as they are performing characters in fictional TV series. About half of the corpus comes from comedy genres and the other half from drama genres.