A literature review on the mediation of sociolinguistic style in television and cinematic fiction: Sustaining the ideology of authenticity

Abstract

A shift of contemporary sociolinguistic research towards media and pop cultural discourse has been observed (e.g. Lopez, 2009; Meek, 2006). Despite the proliferation of studies, there has not been a systematic attempt to chart this field of research. In the light of this, in the present article I review research on the representations of sociolinguistic style in TV and film fictional discourse. The review reveals that although the epistemology of social construction has privileged the analysis of fictional data, the paradigm upon which most of the reviewed studies have drawn remains a traditional one. Similarly, a view of fiction as a reflection of sociolinguistic style is still a dominant conceptual framework from which many researchers tend to interpret their analyses. In conclusion, it is suggested that this research strand tends to confirm the ‘artificiality’ of fiction, by eventually sustaining the ideology of sociolinguistic authenticity.

Sociolinguistic representations of the military in Greek comedy films

“…In this context, contrary to the growing interest of cultural and media research in cinematic representations of the military, the sociolinguistics of cinematic discourse, as a body of research emerging only over the last decade, has dealt with social categories traditionally linked to sociolinguistic research on non-mediated data (Stamou 2014). Specifically, most of these studies have focused on film representations of ethnicity (and gender), such as the appropriation of Asian masculinity by nonAsian protagonists in Hollywood martial arts films (Hiramoto 2015), the use of White, Hollywood African-American English for the construction of hegemonic black masculinity (Bucholtz 2011), or the German practices of dubbing Hollywood African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) into a passable target language (Queen 2004).…”

“…Consequently, this kind of analysis discloses the ways officers and soldiers are represented in the film as constructing themselves and each other during fictional interaction; in the process, it examines the role of the military sociolect. In this way, we address some of the limitations detected in the sociolinguistic research of fiction, which has not largely opted for micro-level discourse analytical approaches (Stamou 2014).…”

'Linguistic Diversity on TV': A Program for Developing Children's Multiliteracies Skills

“…The development of a critical stance is considered necessary, as it has been indicated that television and film tend to represent linguistic diversity in a way that the dominant language ideologies of homogenization are reproduced, e.g. through the allocation of low-status speech styles to peripheral and low-class characters, whereas sociallyprestigious speech styles are usually employed for the construction of central and elite characters' speech (Stamou, 2014;in press).…”

‘Listening’ to the Neanderthals in William Golding’s The Inheritors : A sociopragmatic approach to fictional dialogue

“…So what are we to make of this often held but difficult to maintain view that characterises much of the previous work on The Inheritors (1955)? Applying Stamou's (2011Stamou's ( : 2014 work on the way "mass cultural texts" (2011: 329) represent sociolinguistic variety provides some useful avenues for answering this question. In a review of how such representations tend to be analysed and interpreted, Stamou (2014) finds that the research falls largely into two broad camps, variationist and constructionist (122).…”

“…Applying Stamou's (2011Stamou's ( : 2014 work on the way "mass cultural texts" (2011: 329) represent sociolinguistic variety provides some useful avenues for answering this question. In a review of how such representations tend to be analysed and interpreted, Stamou (2014) finds that the research falls largely into two broad camps, variationist and constructionist (122). Analyses adopting the variationist stance, as Stamou (2014) explains, tended to treat sociolinguistic variation in a fairly "static" way (122).…”