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For a long time, TV has been considered to have no cultural, educational or intellectual values. Many children have been told that watching TV will make them stupid – they should rather read a book. People who want to be perceived as educated and intellectual often deny that they watch TV, or they claim to only watch quality TV. This attitude towards TV in general or - more specifically - as a source for academic research has started to change. TV is most certainly not devoid of values, and while the quality of different TV shows might be debatable, its legitimacy for academic study is not. Of course, the researcher needs to keep in mind that the dialogs are scripted and are not examples of natural speech. But as Beers (2016) puts it: “television dialogue could be thought of as representing a communicative ideal”, so they present the researcher a pure version of language without any interference and are easily accessible via transcriptions online.
In this class we will look at different linguistic topics from morphology, semantics and pragmatics. In a second step we will see how they are used for different purposes in TV shows and how we can use TV transcripts as a corpus for linguistic research. |
