Language of Fictional Television

Monika Bednarek is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Sydney, Australia.

'Monika Bednarek's careful quantitative eye looks around unusual corners for a corpus linguist. Her book The Language of Fictional Television offers a distinctive, linguistic approach to analyzing popular culture, but draws productively on stylistics, cultural studies, media studies and sociological frameworks. This book provides a model for linguists who want to combine corpus evidence with 'big picture' questions, like how characterisation and identity works, and how ideologies are naturalized - and might be challenged - both in and out of fiction. The material can be adapted for teaching materials in senior undergraduate and postgraduate classes: for example, the chapter on how vegetarians and vegetarian foods are construed, and how this is involved in character development in the 'dramedy' Gilmore Girls, makes an excellent platform for teaching language and ideology.'

• 1. Introduction \ Part I Fictional Television: Dialogue and Drama \ 2. Analysing Television \ 3. The Genre of Dramedy and its Audience \ 4. Television Dialogue \ Part II Fictional Television: Character Identity \ 5. Dialogue and Character Identity \ 6. Expressive Character Identity and Emotive Interjections \ 7. The Multimodal Performance \ 8. Expressive Character Identity and Ideology: Shared Attitudes \ 9. Conclusion \ References \ Indices