This thesis is a cultural study of Jewishness in network sitcom television. Sources for the study included: historical film analysis, sociological studies on stereotyping and Jewish culture. The thesis studies how past forms of Jewishness impacted the current depictions of Jewishness on the television sitcom. After an introduction discussing Jewishness in general, the second chapter studies Jewishness in Vaudeville and early Hollywood film. The third chapter studies Jewishness in the first 40 years of network sitcom television. The fourth chapter studies Jewishness in the network sitcoms of the 1990s. The conclusions of the study focus on the state of Jewishness on network sitcom television at present, and ask what must be done within the industry to maintain a viable Jewish identity on network sitcom television in the future.

This study investigates the creation of humor in the dialog of the television sit-com Seinfeld to gain a deeper understanding of humor techniques in a long format. By analyzing six episodes of the series, it is seen that the Incongruity Theory of Humor, violations of Grice’s maxims of the Cooperative Principle, and perspective clashes (such as miscommunications) are essential to the humor throughout each episode.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T18:23:55Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Elaine Rampazzi.pdf: 2874748 bytes, checksum: e131f6647d36c33ebf39a4d745daaf70 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008-10-28 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / The aim of this research was to create activities that can aid the development of the oral fluency of English students of language institutes through Corpus Linguistics analysis. In that regard, the research aimed at finding which are the most frequently phrasal verbs and verbal associations in the oral speech as well as its most typical lexical patterns - to help teachers in preparing material Hence, the main theoretical underpinning for the present study was provided by Corpus Linguistics, which can be defined as a field of Linguistic study concerned with collecting and analysing corpora, which are collections of electronic texts that have been carefully collected for linguistic research. Three corpora have been used in this study. The main corpus is composed by all the episodes of the ten seasons of the sitcom Friends and the nine seasons of the sitcom Seinfeld, made up of 1.622.991 words. The reference corpus contains the oral component of the British National Corpus (BNC), amounting to 4,335,731 words. The research questions pursued in this study aimed at identifying, in the corpora, the most frequent phrasal verbs and prepositional verbs used in oral speech as well as the its most frequent lexicogrammatical patterns. The results of the analysis made it possible to select the terms and its lexicogrammatical patterns to be included in the activities suggested at the end of chapter three. This study will hopefully have made a creative contribution to the existing body of Corpus Linguistics research, more specifically in the area of EFL teaching, as it provides a practical use of Corpus Linguistics and its tools in English Language Teaching and proposes classroom activities based on an oral and audiovisual corpus, seeking to provide the EFL classroom with more enjoyment and efficiency / Esta pesquisa teve como objetivo descobrir os verbos frasais (phrasal verbs) e verbos preposicionados mais freqüentes no corpus de estudo, bem como os padrões léxico-gramaticais com os quais podem ser encontrados neste mesmo corpus, partindo-se da investigação linguística utilizando corpora. Ao mesmo tempo, teve como objetivo secundário aplicar o resultado da análise na preparação de atividades que ajudem a promover o aprendizado de alguns destes padrões, criteriosamente selecionados dos corpora dos seriados Friends e Seinfeld. Para tanto, a presente pesquisa buscou suporte teórico na Lingüística de Corpus que podemos definir como o ramo da Lingüística que se ocupa da coleta e exploração de corpora, ou conjunto de dados lingüísticos textuais, em formato legível por computador, que foram coletados criteriosamente com o propósito de servirem para a pesquisa de uma língua ou variedade lingüística (Berber Sardinha, 2004:3). Três corpora foram utilizados na pesquisa. O corpus de estudo é composto por todos os episódios das 10 temporadas de Friends e das nove temporadas do seriado Seinfeld, totalizando 1.622.991 palavras. O corpus de referência é composto pela parte oral do British National Corpus (BNC), com 4.335.731 palavras. As perguntas de pesquisa tiveram o objetivo de identificar, nos corpora, os chunks mais frequêntes para verbos frasais e preposicionados utilizados no discurso oral, bem como seus padrões léxico-gramaticais mais frequêntes. Os resultados da análise permitiram a escolha criteriosa dos itens a serem utilizados na elaboração das atividades sugeridas ao final do capítulo três. A pesquisa pretende ter contribuído para a área de Lingüística de Corpus, especificamente para a área de Ensino de Idiomas, na medida em que proporciona uma aplicação da Lingüística de Corpus e de suas ferramentas no ensino de Língua Inglesa e propõe a elaboração de atividades didáticas com base em um corpus de linguagem oral e audiovisual, buscando transformar o estudo de Língua Inglesa em sala de aula em uma experiência mais divertida e eficaz