Corpus-Assisted Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Television and Film Narratives

Films and TV series are popular cultural products with massive global audiences. They construct and reflect social realities, invite audience engagement and create other discourses such as fan reactions, critics’ comments or ‘water cooler conversations’. They are also increasingly sophisticated narratives, with complex characters and plots. The language used in TV/film texts is consumed by billions of viewers world-wide. These are only some of the reasons why such texts are worthy of discourse analysis. At the same time, such narratives integrate multiple meaning-making resources, not just language, and therefore invite a multimodal approach. This chapter considers issues arising in corpus linguistic studies of televisual and filmic texts. Because of their global reach the focus is on English-language products. I will start by addressing general issues before discussing a small case study.