AN ADULT-MINDED BABY: AN EVIL PRODIGY IN FAMILY GUY?

Abstract

The article aims at analysis of the baby’s idiolect in the animated series “Family Guy”, featuring a typical American family. The study focuses on Stewie Griffin’s remarks, the baby in the family, and the way his speech violates age stereotypes (about baby’s talk, the way of thinking, basic needs, life goals, etc.). The conversation, discourse and corpus analyses have been used to single out Stewie’s specific vocabulary – through the word list, keyword list, KWIC – he uses while communicating with his family. His speech is opposed to infant-directed speech to show the contrast between baby-mother and mother-baby discourse. The findings show that the most frequent words in the corpus are “mind”, “device”, “machine”, “victory”, “hell”, “power” that reveal Stewie’s genius nature and intentions of world domination. The key word combinations, that are unique in the research corpus, are mainly related to the semantic field of science (“ultra violet scanning light”, “theory of molecular propulsion”) and technology (“mind-control device”, “time machine”, “penultimate adjustment”). It contradicts age expectations based on the fact that infants of Stewie’s age are supposed to speak in combinations of sounds and simple words. Moreover, Stewie’s idiolect consists of words with negative semantic prosody (“contempible”, “oppressive”, “tyranny”) that emphasize the fact that he is a villain in the animated series. The dialogues between Lois, Stewie’s mother, and the baby reveal Lois’s tendency to use infant-directed speech, e.g. simple sentences in forms of orders, exclamations when she talks to her son. The infant, on the contrary, violates expectations and uses advanced languag