Victim-naming in the murder mystery TV series Twin Peaks: a corpus-stylistic study

Abstract

Corpus linguistics is advancing rapidly in the study of a wide variety of genres, but is still at its infancy in the study of TV series, a genre daily consumed by millions of viewers. Murder mystery series are one of the most popular and proliferous, but no studies, to date, have used corpus-stylistics methodologies in the analysis of the pivotal character of the victim in the whole narrative. This paper applied this methodology hoping to shed some light on the quantitative and qualitative relationship between the participation roles of the characters, and the frequency and distribution of victim-naming choices in the dialogue of the two first seasons of the acclaimed TV series Twin Peaks. The analysis proved that textual reference to the victim in the dialogues is a central genre-cohesive device which may serve as a waymark to guide the audience throughout the many subplots of the series.