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This article analyses Australian Aboriginal English (AAE) in three recent Indigenous-authored television series: Redfern Now, Cleverman, and Mystery Road. Television series and movies have traditionally introduced and reinforced negative attitudes about speakers of minority/minoritised English and nonstandard language varieties. Representations of these varieties of English tend to be selective and inaccurate. However, most linguistic research to date has examined representations in older Hollywood movies. In Australia, there has been a recent growth of Indigenous-authored television drama as well as in the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander characters on television. For viewers, such characters can be an important source of information, especially if they do not regularly interact with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This is the case for many Australian audience members, and even more so for international viewers of Australian television series that are exported overseas--as is the case for all three analysed series. This study employs lexical profiling analysis (with AntWordProfiler) to compare the use of AAE lexis across the three programs. Results show Mystery Road contains the most variety of AAE types as well as the highest proportion of AAE tokens. Cleverman includes the least variety of AAE types and the lowest proportion of AAE tokens, but the most "less-familiar" AAE lexis (engaging with the Dreaming). Redfern Now's use of AAE tokens is only slightly lower than Mystery Road, and it features a higher variety of AAE types than Cleverman. The study demonstrates that the use of such lexis is no barrier to "mainstream" popularity, critical acclaim, and international success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the construction of the Sydney Corpus of Television Dialogue (SydTV). SydTV comprises approximately 275,000-words of dialogue from sixty-six episodes of recent US American fictional television series. The paper first provides a brief overview of existing TV dialogue corpora and then outlines the basic corpus composition, the corpus design principles, and the processes of data collection and storage. SydTV is a small, specialised corpus designed with the objective of being representative of fictional US TV dialogue. TV dialogue is defined as the dialogue uttered by actors on screen as they are performing characters in fictional TV series. The corpus is fairly balanced, since it contains 116,295 words from drama genres and 158,779 words from comedy genres as well as 135,887 words from 'quality' and 139,187 words from 'mainstream' TV series, in addition to a healthy mix of different types of episodes in terms of textual time (pilot episodes, final episodes, episodes occurring at the beginning, middle or end of a season). The corpus is available for educational (teaching and research) purposes through an online interface and has a companion website where frequency lists are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I discuss 'wicked' women in contemporary pop culture, analyzing the language of the 'heroines,' or protagonists, of three popular American television series: Weeds, Nurse Jackie, and Saving Grace. All feature female characters who are 'flawed' in some way and can be described as 'non-conforming,' since they engage in behavior that would be socially and morally condemned - they deal in drugs ( Weeds), are addicted to pills ( Nurse Jackie), or are alcoholics ( Saving Grace). While this has attracted some comment in the mainstream media, such comments are not based on any empirical research and have tended to center on these women's behavior. In contrast, the approach taken here focuses on their linguistic practices, in particular their use of 'bad language,' including taboo words and swearing. The analyses show that all three female protagonists challenge stereotypical expectations about appropriate 'feminine' behavior for white heterosexual Anglo-American women through their use of 'bad language,' while the impact of such cultural representations depends on a range of factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the variation in title sequences for American television series (a sequence of moving images and sound at the beginning of a television series). Using a quantitative survey of 50 contemporary fictional television series, it explores key features of the television title sequence – such as length, credits, characters, sound and style – and relates these to its functional characteristics. In so doing, the article provides a synchronic snapshot of a significant contemporary cultural product that viewers regularly engage with and enjoy. The survey not only shows the variation inherent in these cultural products, but also pinpoints areas that are worth investigating more closely and in depth. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses the linguistic construction of the televisual character Sheldon -- the 'main nerd' in the sitcom The Big Bang Theory (CBS, 2007--), approaching this construction of character through both computerised and 'manual' linguistic analysis. More specifically, a computer analysis of dialogue (using concordances and keyword analysis) in series 1 of The Big Bang Theory provides insights into how Sheldon is constructed through both explicit and implicit cues in his own and others' dialogue, drawing on shared stereotypes of 'nerdiness'. This corpus linguistic analysis is complemented through manual, 'scene-based analysis' of implicit cues in dialogue between Sheldon and Penny, drawing on (im)politeness theory. Previous analyses of film and TV dialogue have shown how linguistic deviance, e.g. in terms of politeness, can construct characters as somehow 'anti-social', 'abnormal', 'rude' or 'not quite human'. The analysis of Sheldon's repertoire provides insights into how and when linguistic deviance constructs nerdiness in contrast to other social identities. This allows us to consider which factors lead to viewers' perception of characters as threateningly abnormal or funnily abnormal or somehow non-human or indeed as other social identities. The analyses also show how dialogue projects a particular social identity drawing on stereotypes and shared knowledge with the audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the analysis of key words and trigrams, this paper explores characteristics of contemporary American English television dialogue. Using a corpus comprising dialogue from seven fictional series (five different genres) and the spoken part of the American National Corpus, key words and trigrams are compared to previous corpus linguistic studies of such dialogue (Mittmann 2006, Quaglio 2009) and further explored on the basis of concordances, with special emphasis on over-represented key words/trigrams and their potential to indicate informality and emotionality. The results suggest that the expression of emotion is a key defining feature of the language of television, cutting across individual series and different televisual genres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]