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Corpus-Assisted Multimodal
Discourse Analysis of Television
and Film Narratives
Monika Bednarek

Introduction: TV and film language

Films and TV series are popular cultural products with massive global audi-
ences. They construct and reflect social realities, invite audience engage-
ment and create other discourses such as fan reactions, critics’ comments
or ‘water cooler conversations’. They are also increasingly sophisticated
narratives, with complex characters and plots. The language used in TV/film
texts is consumed by billions of viewers world-wide. These are only some
of the reasons why such texts are worthy of discourse analysis. At the same
time, such narratives integrate multiple meaning-making resources, not just
language, and therefore invite a multimodal approach. This chapter consid-
ers issues arising in corpus linguistic studies of televisual and filmic texts.
Because of their global reach the focus is on English-language products.
I will start by addressing general issues before discussing a small case study.
In the last decade or so, the language of film and TV series has increas-
ingly attracted the interest of researchers in a variety of linguistic sub-fields
(for example Tagliamonte and Roberts, 2005; Mandala, 2007; Richardson,
2010; Piazza et al., 2011; Androutsopoulos, 2012b). This includes researchers
applying corpus linguistic techniques in the fields of discourse/register stud-
ies, second language acquisition/pedagogy, translation studies and stylistics,
with the main focus of such corpus studies on five key areas:

• the characteristics of film/TV language and the extent to which it is similar

or different to ‘real’ language (for example Quaglio, 2009; Bednarek, 2010,
2011a, 2012b; Rodríguez Martín, 2010; Forchini, 2012; McIntyre, 2012);
• the usefulness of exposure to film/TV language for language learners (for
example Webb and Rodgers, 2009; Webb, 2010; Csomay and Petrovic, 2012);
• issues concerning audio-visual translation, dubbing and subtitling (for
example Baumgarten, 2008; Taylor, 2008; Freddi and Pavesi, 2009a; Baños
et al., 2013b);

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© The Editor(s) 2015
64 Monika Bednarek

• stylistic concerns, such as characterisation (for example Bednarek,

2010, 2011b, 2012a; Mahlberg and McIntyre, 2011; Toolan, 2011); and
• gender and sexuality (for example Rey, 2001; Baker, 2005; McIntyre and
Walker, 2010; McIntyre, 2012).

Often these issues are intertwined: for instance, Toolan’s (2011) discus-
sion of The Wire incorporates both an analysis of multimodal charac-
terisation and of the nature of TV dialogue as ‘an artfully-constructed
selective simulation of natural realistic speech’ (Toolan, 2011: 181).
Research that tackles the usefulness of learner exposure to film/TV dia-
logue often also discusses the extent to which it mimics ‘real’ speech (see
Rodríguez Martín, 2010) and vice versa (Forchini, 2012).
Most corpus linguistic research focuses on eitherr television orr film nar-
ratives, rather than using combined corpora. Nevertheless, as both Piazza
et al. (2011) and Androutsopoulos (2012a) argue, there are similarities
between television and film narratives:

• both are multimodal audio-visual texts;

• both are fictional narratives, with characters and plot;
• both are re-presentations or re-creations of the ‘real’ world, which can
reproduce or challenge societal beliefs, values and norms, including lan-
guage ideologies;
• both exhibit a ‘double’ communicative interaction plane, with an inter-
action between the on-screen characters within the narrative, and an
interaction between the characters and the narrative’s external audience;
• in both, the dialogue is scripted and multi-functional, for example defin-
ing genres, contributing to characterisation, or engaging the audience
(Kozloff, 2000; Bednarek, 2014).

Because of these similarities, Piazza et al. (2011: 1) have coined the term
telecinematic discourse to refer to the language of both cinema and television.
Androutsopoulos (2012a: 140) goes further in arguing that the difference is
mainly

a medium-related distinction. Assuming clear-cut boundaries between the

two is in my view both empirically futile and theoretically unproductive
in the context of contemporary transmedia flows, where films are screened
on television, TV serial productions adopt film narratives and visual aes-
thetics, and all of the above is increasingly transferred to the internet.

However, while the differences between film and TV narratives may not
be clear-cut, they do exist and should not be ignored altogether. Such dif-
ferences predominantly have to do with the ‘serial’ nature of television