Vague words in Law in Order: Special Victims Unit

Jonnathas Vieira, Paula Lança

Resumo


TV series have been a source of input for English language learners, especially the ones interested in real language use. There are studies that show how close to real life some TV shows are (ORFANO, 2010). For this study a corpus of a TV series - Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU) - was compiled. This corpus is composed of 6 episodes (44.400 words). The analysis considered that every Law and Order episode carries investigation and court scenes. The main point of this investigation is to analyze the use of vague words such as any, anything, anyone, anybody, anyway, and anywhere in the TV show. An analysis of the episodes showed that these words occurred 139 times with a frequency distribution that varied in the investigation and court scenes. The results may reveal that more formal contexts, represented in the TV series by the court scenes, do not favor the use of vague language. In such argumentative contexts speakers tend to be more precise.


Texto completo:

PDF

Referências


CARTER, Ronald; MCCARTHY, Michael. Cambridge Grammar of English: A Comprehensive Guide - Spoken and Written English Grammar and Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

CHANNELL, Joanna. Vague Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

CHENG, Winnie. The use of vague language in intercultural conversations in Hong Kong. In: CUTTING, Joan. (Org.). Vague Language Explored. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. p. 161-181.

COTERRIL, Janet. ‘I think he was kind of shouting or something’: Uses and abuses of vagueness in the British courtroom. In: CUTTING, Joan. (Org.). Vague Language Explored. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. p. 97-114.

CUTTING, Joan. Introduction to vague language explored. In: CUTTING, Joan. (Org.). Vague Language Explored. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. p. 3-17.

CUTTING, Joan. Vague language in conference abstracts. Journal of Pragmatics, v. 11, p. 283–293, 2012.

FERNANDEZ, Julieta; YULDASHEV, Aziz. Variation in the use of general extenders and stuff in instant messaging interactions. Journal of Pragmatics, v. 43, p. 2610–2626, 2011.

GONÇALVES, Wanderson. Discurso Formal no Tribunal do Júri: Estratégias Argumentativo-Interacionais. 2010. 206 f. Dissertação (Mestrado em Linguística) - Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Brasília, Brasília, 2011.

GRANT, Lynn. A corpus comparison of the use of I don’t know by British and New Zealand speakers. Journal of Pragmatics, v. 42, p. 2282–2296, 2010.

JUCKER, Andreas; SMITH, Sara; LÜDGE, Tanja. Interactive aspects of vagueness in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, v. 35, p. 1737–1769, 2003.

ORFANO, Barbara. The representation of spoken language: a corpus based study of sitcom discourse. 2010. 305 p. Dissertation (PhD in Applied Linguistics) - Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland, 2010.

QUAGLIO, Paulo. Television dialogue: the sitcom Friends vs. natural conversation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2009.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17851/2317-4242.7.0.112-124

Apontamentos

  • Não há apontamentos.


Revele: Revista Virtual dos Estudantes de Letras
ISSN 2317-4242 (eletrônica)

Licença Creative Commons
Licenciada sob uma licença Creative Commons Atribuição-NãoComercial-SemDerivados 3.0 Não Adaptada.