Film discourse

Film discourse – a hybrid register combining conversational and narrative features – has received considerable attention from linguists. Especially in relatively recent years, a good number of the studies conducted on the topic have adopted corpus tools and techniques. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a brief account of corpus-assisted research on cinematic speech. This will be done by illustrating the research questions, the methodologies and the types of corpora that have been current in this area of study. In addition, the chapter will present a case study where findings obtained through different methodologies (i.e., multi-dimensional analysis and 4-grams) from big and small filmic corpora are compared. The affinities emerging from these findings will be discussed as evidence that film discourse is a register characterised by a rather stable, repetitive, conventionalised lexico-grammar.