TV Series (Dec 2023)
What TV series “do” to phonology and vice-versa – or should TV series be used as phonological corpora?
Abstract
Over the last few years, we have witnessed the application of “corpus linguistic techniques” (Bednarek 2015) to the study of telecinematic language, which has resulted in the development of TV series corpora (Bednarek 2020, Davies 2021) for the systematic analysis of on-screen dialogue, defined as “the dialogue that the audience encounters when watching a TV episode. In terms of mode, such dialogue can be characterised as ‘THE SPEAKING OF WHAT IS WRITTEN TO BE SPOKEN AS IF NOT WRITTEN’” (Gregory 1967: 191, original capitalization, in Bednarek 2018: 9). However, when surveying the literature, it appears that TV series corpora are still most often approached on the written side (through scripts and subtitles), with research questions relating to morphosyntax, pragmatics or translation for example; and when they are approached on the spoken or multimodal side, seldom do researchers resort to phonetic-acoustic analyses of the accents spoken or the voices used (Gibson 2011, Habasque 2019, Boberg 2021), even when voices and accents are discussed from a sociolinguistic perspective (Gasquet-Cyrus & Planchenault 2019, LeFèvre-Berthelot 2020). So why are TV series not more commonly used as phonological corpora, when we consider that they correspond to Gut and Voorman’s definition (2014: 16)?This is what we offer to discuss here: first, in terms of what phonology does for fiction and to TV series, as far as geographical and historical anchoring (Viollain & Chatellier 2020), characterization (Lippi-Green 2012), and the representation and interpretation (encoding and decoding) of identities, communities and norms are concerned; then, in terms of what TV series do to phonology “in real life”, particularly phonological change (Stuart-Smith 2006) but also phonology as taught in the classroom, and how they challenge the field itself. We claim that TV series question its methods, the nature of its corpora (Viollain & Chatellier 2018), its purpose, and its relationship with other disciplines, namely fictolinguistics (Ferguson 1998), phonostylistics (Jobert 2018), corpus stylistics (McIntyre 2015) as well as perceptual dialectology, sociolinguistics, cognitive and psycholinguistics. We will detail some of the research avenues that TV series corpora open for phonologists and sociophoneticians and advocate their inclusion in research protocols aiming at building a large comparative database of speakers’ evaluations of their own or other accents, as another tool in the “large palette of techniques for exploring the phonological structures of given languages” (Durand 2017).
