Journal of Language and Pop Culture - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2025

Abstract

In this article, I analyze language on the reality television show My Big Fat Fabulous Life, asking how the show reconciles a positive framing of the fat female body within makeover/intervention media. Using critical discourse analysis, I focus on the presence of external “enforcers” representing cultural norms of health and weight. I argue that these normative discourses temper the show’s celebration of fatness, thus making the larger display legible to the audience as fitting within reality TV, self-transformations, and the neoliberal order. Despite explicit talk of body positivity and acceptance, the show overall reinscribes the hegemonic narrative in which the only acceptable fat female body is one whose ultimate destination is thinness, and who is actively working to get there.

Abstract

The paper examines language change based on evidence from the Corpus of Greek Film Dialogue, an extensive corpus of dialogues from 105 Greek films, spanning nine decades (from 1938 to 2018, approx. 900,000 words in total). Keywords are identified for each decade of film dialogues with reference to the corpus as a whole, as well as with reference to conversational and other data from Greek corpora. Language change in the data is found to be crucially related to (im)politeness, involving terms of address, intimacy markers, address verbs, politeness formulae and response forms. Findings point to a general trend towards more informal, less hierarchical and more intimate and offensive vocabulary, similarly to what has been found in the literature on telecinematic discourse in other languages. Overall, the corpus-based diachronic approach followed suggests that (im)politeness is especially foregrounded in film dialogues, as compared to non-scripted conversation.

Abstract

Past research on American telecinematic media suggested that foreign-accented English often marked contrastive characters. However, studies addressing Hollywood’s representations of individual groups of non-native speakers of English have been scant. Moreover, although the degree of foreign accent in character depiction was commented on, apparently being meaningful, it was not systematically assessed. This article analyzes the use of various degrees of foreign accentedness in the portrayals of Russian characters in 36 Hollywood films released in the post-Soviet period. Focusing on contrastive roles, determined as negative, criminal, and comic, the study identifies their correlation with stronger foreign accents. In addition, characters with elite occupations display a higher degree of foreign accentedness than characters with mainstream occupations, which is explained by the less perceived threat of the latter, hence, less need to be cast as a linguistic other. The findings indicate that the accent portrayals of Russians in American cinema are biased and reflect a broader standard language ideology in the US. The study also provides support for the supposition that negative attitudes toward Russian English in the US are prompted by unfavorable images of cinematic Russians.

Abstract

App-mediated ride sharing services like Uber and Lyft represent a relatively new chronotope that shapes participants’ identities and relationships through specific space and time configurations. Ridesharing services such as these blur the boundaries between what is public/private, familiar/unfamiliar, and interactional/transactional, resulting in chronotopically specific scenarios that are often humorously exploited by stand-up comedians in their routines. In this paper, we analyze several short video clips of performances posted by comedians on TikTok comprising narratives about Uber/Lyft experiences from the perspective of the ridesharing passenger. Our findings show that in these comedic performances the ridesharing chronotope is characterized by various forms of relational ambiguity and that this relational ambiguity structures interactional frames for its participants. Through their comedic artistry, comedians animate the diverse voices engaged in these types of encounters, shedding light on variable norms and ideologies underlying ridesharing interactions. This study addresses a novel context and an as-yet unexplored topic: the language used by stand-up comedians who make their performances available to audiences through their social media accounts. Methodologically, the affordances of TikTok facilitate the identification of topically similar comedic content, resulting in a topic-based, rather than a performer-driven, analysis.

Abstract

This article examines whether audiences ascribe moral qualities to fictional characters based on the sound of their voices. We first review psychological and sociocultural mechanisms whereby a character’s voice may be heard as morally diagnostic. Presented next is an online perception study in which 250 participants rated the moral qualities of 22 fictional characters following brief exposure to their voices. The voice clips, all of which were performed by the same professional voice actor, were extracted from “actual-play” sessions of Dungeons & Dragons. Participants came mainly from Europe and North America and had different degrees of familiarity with the fictional source materials. Our results indicated general agreement among participants in their assignment of moral qualities to the different characters. While characters with clear, resonant, and otherwise unexceptionable voices were perceived as mostly good, characters with harsh, whispery, and otherwise “othering” voices were often perceived as evil.

This article reviews Language and characterisation in television series: A corpus-informed approach to the construction of social identity in the media€ 99$ 149

This article reviews Evaluative language in sports discourse: Crowds, coaches and commentators£ 145