“I am super excited to be on this show”: Expressive language in The Voice USA

Expressivity – i.e. the overt expression of stances, feelings, emotions, and attitudes – is a prominent feature of colloquial conversation and is found in a variety of contemporary discourses, among which is TV discourse. This paper will consider the paradigmatic case of the TV singing competition show The Voice USA. Through an analysis of keywords in 109 episodes extracted from the TV Corpus (Davies 2019), it will be illustrated that the language of the show displays a remarkably high degree of expressivity. Juxtaposing the findings obtained for The Voice USA and congruent evidence from previous literature, the paper will suggest that expressivity has become a ‘compulsory’ element in contemporary communication.