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Article published In: Journal of Language and Pop Culture
Vol. 1:2 (2025) ► pp.177–202

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Language change and (im)politeness in film discourse

Evidence from the Corpus of Greek Film Dialogue

ORCiD logo with link | National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Published online: 17 March 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlpop.24014.gou
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.
Article outline
  • 1.Film dialogues and pop culture
  • 2.Data and methodology
  • 3.Keywords across decades of film dialogue
  • 4.Film dialogues vs. non-scripted conversation
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (83)
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