English Text Construction - Volume 16, Issue 2, 2023

Suspense as an aesthetic effect is a key narrative strategy of thriller movies, serving the function of entertainment for wide audiences. As the plot unfolds, arcs of suspense rely on triggering an appealing sense of anticipation that calls for a resolution. The present study examines the creation of suspense throughout fictional dialogue in Quentin Tarantino’s popular feature films Pulp Fiction (1994), Inglourious Basterds (2009), and Django Unchained (2012). In these movies, dialogic interaction is often dominated by eloquent villains who skilfully flout the conversational maxims of Grice’s cooperative principle, thereby exercising verbal power over other interlocutors. As is demonstrated in a qualitative pragma-stylistic framework, the villains’ discursive strategies amount to stylistic deviation resulting in suspenseful implicatures. In particular, suspense is commonly caused by digressing from current topics, by giving too little information or too many details, by being insincere or ironic, and by making equivocal or redundant statements.

This paper explores how educational research and stylistics, fields that rarely intersect, can be in closer dialogue in the study of pop culture texts, artefacts of interest to scholars in both disciplines. I establish in a systematized critical interpretive synthesis that educational research tends to treat pop culture texts as documents. I show that this in turn tends to drive content-focused analyses that stay, from a linguistic point of view, at the surface of the texts. In response, I offer a stylistic analysis of a pop culture text, an episode from the situation comedy The Big Bang Theory that features an English language learner. I employ conversation analysis to interpret the dialogue and demonstrate how a linguistic approach opens up readings on the discursive construction of phenomena such as belonging and exclusion.

This study explores how mental health is represented and discussed in English-language pop song lyrics. To this end, a specialized corpus of mental health songs, understood as songs that explicitly mention or refer to issues related to mental health and resilience, is analyzed through a combined linguistic/language-educational lens. The aim is to describe these songs linguistically in order to discuss opportunities as well as limitations for the development of mental health literacy in EFL classes. It emerges that relevant lyrics possess the potential to familiarize learners with the relevant discourse of mental health and mental disorders, and several practical language-educational suggestions are offered. On a general note, it is argued that lyrics not only offer starting points for the development of linguistic and literary competencies, but also for a critical examination of a complex, highly relevant, and timely topic.

This article deals with the phenomenon of mondegreens, a term coined in 1954 to describe when a listener to a pop song mishears the lyrics and sings her own version instead, as in Strangers in the night, exchanging glasses (rather than glances). A distinction is made in the literature between within-language mondegreens, which occur when a listener produces a mondegreen in the same language as the original (as in Strangers in the night, exchanging glasses), and cross-language mondegreens, when a listener produces a mondegreen in a different language to the original (as in the German Agathe Bauer for the English I’ve got the power). The key question that the article addresses is: Why do we mondegreen? After providing an overview of the approaches to both within-language and cross-language mondegreens that have been taken in linguistics and related disciplines, the article then draws on cognitive psychology and its approach to creativity to argue that mondegreens are in fact better understood not so much as simple errors as products of the creative mind.

In this paper, we look at characterisation in the popular fiction genre Chick Lit by analysing laughter-talk in conversational humour. This is the first systematic analysis of how a variety of humour phenomena are linguistically realised in the genre despite humour being as aspect recurrently referred to as intrinsic to the genre. We use a combination of methods, both corpus-based and qualitative in nature, to identify instances in which laughter occurs, which we (broadly) associate with the presence of humour. Thus, with the use of self-compiled corpora, we assess the nature of humorous mechanisms in the genre. We conclude by arguing that humorous encounters are genre-defining and essential for characterisation. Humour analysis allows us to argue that Chick Lit protagonists are prototypically presented as non-aggressive, non-threatening individuals, which also contributes to the depiction of down-to-earth characters readers expect in the genre.

From the earliest days, Irish characters have played a prominent role in American comics. The hero of Hogan’s Alley, the first American comic strip to feature a speech balloon, was an Irish child named Mickey Dugan, a.k.a. “The Yellow Kid”. Likewise, the star of Happy Hooligan, the first US comic strip to employ speech balloons on a regular basis, was Irish. Thus, not only are Irish characters important in the early history of American comics, their speech is too. The way that this was represented resembled existing portrayals in pop culture, involving respellings, non-standard grammar and lexical items deemed typical of the variety. While some of these continued to index Irishness in comics, others also emerged. Building on previous research, this study examines a corpus of American comics from numerous genres and publishing houses to offer the most comprehensive overview yet of Irish speech in the medium.