This study focuses on all-male dialogues in the popular television series Supernatural. The purpose is to determine if and to what extent some linguistic features that are said to be characteristic of competitive talk among men occur in these dialogues. Do modern, scripted dialogues correspond to the impression given in the literature? Can the principal male characters‟ spoken interaction in Supernatural be considered competitive and thus stereotypically male?The material for this quantitative and qualitative study consists of the entire third season of the series, which comprises 16 episodes that were originally broadcast in 2007-2008. The quantitative analysis consists in counting the occurrences of the linguistic features investigated in the dialogues between two or all three of the main characters. The qualitative aspect was about identifying and interpreting the linguistic features in relation to the contexts in which they occur.The results show that the dialogues between the three main characters in Supernatural do contain some features said to be characteristic of competitive speech among men. While there are no occurrences of verbal sparring, the other phenomena investigated (questions, impersonal topics, monologues and playing the expert) are common. However, the results also show interesting aspects of these features that do not correspond with competitive speech style.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:mdh-14387 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Dahlqvist, Ingeborg |
| Publisher | Mälardalens högskola, Akademin för utbildning, kultur och kommunikation |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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