Description

When we watch and listen to actors speaking lines that have been written by someone else-a common experience if we watch any television at all-the illusion of "people talking" is strong. These characters are people like us, but they are also different, products of a dramatic imagination, and the talk they exchange is not quite like ours.

Television Dramatic Dialogue examines, from an applied sociolinguistic perspective, and with reference to television, the particular kind of "artificial" talk that we know as dialogue: onscreen/on-mike talk delivered by characters as part of dramatic storytelling in a range of fictional and nonfictional TV genres. As well as trying to identify the place which this kind of language occupies in sociolinguistic space, Richardson seeks to understand the conditions of its production by screenwriters and the conditions of its reception by audiences, offering two case studies, one British (Life on Mars) and one American (House).

Features

• Focuses on a kind of language use that has been little studied and may be regarded as rather unworthy from some perspectives.
• Iinterdisciplinary, bridging between applied language studies and television drama research.
• Identifies new impoliteness phenomena in language use.
• Contributes to ongoing debates about quality in TV drama and the nature of creativity.

Product Details

272 pages; 1; 6-1/8 x 9-1/4; ISBN13: 978-0-19-537405-6ISBN10: 0-19-537405-3

About the Author(s)