This book provides positive evidence regarding the validity of the language used in sitcom and drama audiovisual genres and its possible applicability to the teaching of pragmatics in English as second and foreign language contexts. The first part of the text includes a description of pragmatics and its components, speech act theories development, and the use of audiovisual input for the teaching of pragmatic aspects. The second section is devoted to the sitcom and drama transcripts analysis of direct and indirect realisations of multiple speech acts as pragmalinguistic resources, sociopragmatic variables that may influence conversation, such as politeness needs and context, and interactional patterns, including turn-taking, sequences and adjacency pairs. The book provides insightful quantitative and qualitative results which will serve to confirm, along with previous research, the usefulness and validity of this type of input, not only for teaching pragmatics, but also for the development of tasks and activities with different pedagogical outcomes and students’ needs. As such, this volume is a useful resource for pragmaticians and discourse analysis scholars since its complete analysis of transcripts justifies the validity of audiovisual input and its different applications.

This cutting-edge collection of articles provides the first organised reflection on the language of films and television series across British, American and Italian cultures. The volume suggests new directions for research and applications, and offers a variety of methodologies and perspectives on the complexities of "telecinematic" discourse – a hitherto virtually unexplored area of investigation in linguistics. The papers share a common vision of the big and small screen: the belief that the discourses of film and television offer a re-presentation of our world. As such, telecinematic texts reorganise and recreate language (together with time and space) in their own way and with respect to specific socio-cultural conventions and media logic. The volume provides a multifaceted, yet coherent insight into the diegetic – as it revolves around narrative – as opposed to mimetic – as referring to other non-narrative and non-fictional genres – discourses of fictional media. The collection will be of interest to researchers, tutors and students in pragmatics, stylistics, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, communication studies and related fields.

Explores contemporary US television dialogue - the on-screen language that viewers worldwide encounter as they watch popular television series.

Explores how literature is used as a model of spoken language and to develop speaking skills in second language learning.

The first handbook to survey and expand the burgeoning field of corpus pragmatics, the intersection of pragmatics and corpus linguistics.

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).

Textual Explorations General Editors- Mick Short, Lancaster University Elena Semino, Lancaster University The focus of this series is on the stylistic analysis of literary and non-literary texts, and the theoretical issues which such work raises. Textual Explorations will include books that cover studies of literary authors, genres and other groupings, stylistic studies of non-literary texts, translation study, the teaching of language and literature, the empirical study of literature, and corpus approaches to stylistics and literature study. Books in the series will centre on texts written in English. Readership of the series is mainly undergraduate and postgraduate students, although advanced sixth formers will also find the books accessible. The series will be of particular interest to those who study English language, English literature, text linguistics, discourse analysis and communication studies. Language & Characterisation- People in Plays & Other Texts explores how the words of a text create a particular impression of a character in the reader's mind. Drawing together theories from linguistics, social cognition and literary stylistics, it is the first book-length study to focus on: the role of language and characterisation characterisation in the dialogue of play texts Containing numerous examples from Shakespeare's plays, the book also considers a wide range of other genres, including, prose fiction, verse, films, advertisements, jokes and newspapers. Language and Characterisation is as practical as it is theoretical and equips readers with analytical frameworks to reveal and explain both the cognitive and the linguistic sides of characterisation. Clear and detailed introductions are given to the theories, and useful suggestions for further analysis are also made at the end of each part of the book. The book will be essential reading for students and researchers of language, literature and communication.