The language of fictional television

Abstract

This article describes differences in the frequency of words/n-grams in television dialogue as compared with a variety of other corpora. It explores frequent lexico-grammatical patterns in the television series Gilmore Girls, in other fictional programmes, and in unscripted spoken and written English. Using ranked frequency lists, the ‘dramedy’ Gilmore Girls is compared both to unscripted language and to a corpus containing dialogue from ten other television series. The results allow us to describe both the specifics of the dialogue of this particular dramedy and the general characteristics of scripted television dialogue as compared to unscripted spoken and written language. The findings also confirm previous assumptions made on the basis of different data that television dialogue is more emotional, but less narrative and vague than naturally occurring conversation.