←10 | 11→is also present in McKee (1997: 71), who states that ‘the first step toward a well-told story is to create a small, knowable world’. From the field of TS, Chaume (2003) further highlights the usefulness of genre for sense attribution, considering the identification of the intentionality behind a text as a necessary preliminary task for translation professionals.
Tous-Rovirosa (2010: 229) attributes a second function to the recognition of television products: it does not only help to understand a text, but is also a source of pleasure for audiences. The notion of enjoyment caused by revisiting a work of art has been pointed out by scholars in other areas, such as Calvino (1995) in his collection of essays for the reading and (re-reading) of classic literary pieces.
From the point of view of the screenwriter, McKee (1997: 91) assigns a third function to recognition: its creative potential. The author explores the idea of creative limitations and states that in screenwriting,
genre conventions […] do not inhibit creativity, they inspire it. The challenge is to keep convention but avoid cliché. […] With mastery of the genre we can guide audiences through rich, creative variations on convention to reshape and exceed expectations by giving the audience not only what it had hoped for but, if we’re very good, more than it could have imagined.
This opinion seems to be shared by other professionals in screenwriting, like Wolff and Cox (1988: 241), who invite trainees to write stories offering something that is just ‘a bit new’, the implication being that it is good (or normal) to stick to genre conventions.
In addition to these three functions of genre and recognition, which foreground the conceptualisation of genre as a group of texts sharing formal features, there are further conditionings that affect the language used in TV series, mainly imposed by broadcasting companies, as discussed in subsequent chapters. Recent contributions such as Brown’s (2013: 3) point to commercial dominance as one of the main factors dominating what constitutes TV genre:
[I];t is not altogether clear whether the ‘genre’ should be defined chiefly in formal, commercial or industrial terms. Whilst we should not rule out the possibility of a more traditionally text-based formulation that considers recurring narrative and structural patterns or ideological overtones, such a project would be a major undertaking.
←11 | 12→
With regard to the sharing of formal features, hybridity of genres and programming formats has come to be a common practice in the TV industry today (Allen 1989). The distinction between both concepts, that is, genre and format, is pointedly explained by Neale and Turner (2001: 7) as follows:
Formats can be original and thus copyright, franchised under licence, and traded as a commercial property. Genres, by definition, are not original. Format is a production category with relatively rigid boundaries that are difficult to transgress without coming up with a new format. […] Genre is the larger, more inclusive category and can be used to describe programmes that use a number of related formats, such as the game show.
Hybridation of genres in different TV formats has paved the way for scholars to speak of ‘generic marks that guarantee the recognition of the different genres by the spectator in a single TV product’ (Tous-Rovirosa 2010: 59, my translation). Such generic marks include basically specific visual elements or settings as well as thematic recurrence. As a visual topos, Tous-Rovirosa (2013: 21), provides the example of a blackboard in TV series where a talented character, the nerd, displays their ideas for a police team (i.e. for the audience) to better follow them. Chapter 4 reports on other recurrent visual topoi used in the series that make up the corpus under scrutiny.
The present study raises the question of whether specific lexical or syntactic structures may constitute generic marks (norms?) in audiovisual products. This idea has been previously explored in the case of written specialised texts, where Gläser (1979), Göpferich (1995), and Wilss (1997) have observed recurrent text blocks. Tannen (1982: 51) also speaks of ‘ritual texts’ that display recurrent resources depending on whether it is written or spoken language. Bednarek (2010: 66–67), in turn, argues that there are identifiable feature conventions in TV dialogue, as well as ‘genre-specific vocabulary and discourse’, and goes on to state that:
[I];t is further likely that different genres of fictional television have linguistic differences, with more witty, fast-paced dialogue in sitcom and other comedy genres, ←12 | 13→and more institutional discourse, technical language, criminal cant, jargon or slang in crime series […], medical dramas […] or sci-fi series.
The notion is somewhat present in Chaume’s (2003: 201) suggestion that TV series hold ‘predictable elements’ that appear in an expectable order, as well as in Baños (2014: 81) allusion to the ‘specificities of the audiovisual medium’. Arias-Badia and Brumme (2014) provide a first approach to recurrent linguistic patterns in TV police procedurals. As shown in Chapter 4, the fact that fictional characters play with genre conventions is evidence that the language of these series is conventionalised and based on a long genre tradition.
Linguistic research has long been concerned with the identification and description of systematic, recurring patterns of language use, based on the idea that much language use is routine (Stubbs 1993; Hanks 1996). The recurrence of these patterns matches Coseriu’s (1952) description of norm as the objectively established principles followed by speakers of a language, rather than rules imposed by subjective assessment criteria.
Thus, the term norm is understood as descriptive in this framework. As Curzan (2014: 18) points out, ‘[d];escriptive “rules” describe regularities in a language variety’s structure that are developed through analysis of what speakers do; they are sometimes invariant but not always’. Interestingly for the purposes of this study, both norms and genre were variables already under consideration in the classical approach to communicative events referred to by the acronym SPEAKING (situation, participants, ends, acts, key, instrumentalities, norms, and genre), proposed by Hymes (1989/1972).
Particularly since the 1960s, when the Brown Corpus was compiled, corpora have been a major tool employed by linguists for the exploration of patterns or norms. As defined by Sinclair (1991: 171), corpora are ‘collection[s]; of naturally occurring language text, chosen to characterise ←13 | 14→a state or variety of
