“Get us the hell out of here”: Key words and trigrams in fictional television series

Based on the analysis of key words and trigrams, this paper explores characteristics of contemporary American English television dialogue. Using a corpus comprising dialogue from seven fictional series (five different genres) and the spoken part of the American National Corpus, key words and trigrams are compared to previous corpus linguistic studies of such dialogue (Mittmann 2006, Quaglio 2009) and further explored on the basis of concordances, with special emphasis on over-represented key words/trigrams and their potential to indicate informality and emotionality. The results suggest that the expression of emotion is a key defining feature of the language of television, cutting across individual series and different televisual genres.