Colloquium title: Deconstructing authenticity/linguistic realism
Location: Room 7402, Robert C. Brown Hall, Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6 
Date and time: Thursday, September 19th, 12:30pm–2:00pm

From the abstract

      Authenticity or linguistic realism concerns the extent to which scripted language practices align with ‘real-world’ practices. In this talk, authenticity will be considered in relation to fictional television narratives (TV series), which are part of the “narrative mass media” (Queen 2015: 12-15), with television dialogue a type of “telecinematic discourse” (Piazza et al 2011).
      On the one hand, television dialogue has to be realistic enough so that it does not alienate viewers or prevent suspension of disbelief. Consequently, the creation of realism is an important function of language use in television (Bednarek 2018).
      On the other hand, television series are a type of mass-mediated ‘high performance event’, where authenticity is ‘subordinated to the priority to entertain’ (Coupland 2007: 150) and television language has to fulfil multiple functions for the audience (Bednarek 2018).
      This is but one of the complications to consider when linguists examine authenticity in fictional television series. In this talk I therefore aim to deconstruct and complicate this notion, using examples from the Australian context. I intend to show that the endeavour of analysing authenticity is much more complex than it might seem at first glance and that there is much scope for additional linguistic research on authenticity/realism in telecinematic discourse, beyond the common foci of existing research in linguistics.

References

Bednarek, M. 2018. Language and Television Series. A Linguistic Approach to TV Dialogue. Cambridge University Press.
Coupland, N. 2007. Style. Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge University Press.
Piazza, R., Bednarek, M., & Rossi, F. (eds) 2011. Telecinematic Discourse. Approaches to the Language of Film and Television Series. John Benjamins.
Queen, R. 2015. Vox Popular: The Surprising Life of Language in the Media. Wiley-Blackwell.

About the speaker

Dr. Monika Bednarek is a professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney and Director of the Sydney Corpus Lab. Her lab aims to promote corpus linguistics in Australia and to build research capacity in corpus linguistics at the University of Sydney. Through collaboration with the University of Queensland, the Sydney Corpus Lab participates in the Australian Text Analytics Platform (ATAP) and the HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons (HASS and Indigenous RDC).