Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional custodians of the land on which this book was written and pay my respects to Elders past, and present.

This book brings together for the first time multiple corpus linguistic studies of televisual characterisation that I have undertaken over a period spanning more than a decade. More precisely, the book draws on case studies of televisual characterisation originally published between 2010 and 2021. Chapter 3 is a blended and reworked version of sections from my 2010 book The Language of Fictional Television and from my chapter in the edited 2011 volume Telecinematic Discourse. Chapter 4 uses material from my 2012 article “Constructing ‘nerdiness’” (Multilingua 31/2–3) together with a small section from my chapter in the edited 2020 volume Telecinematic Stylistics, and Chapter 5 is based on work originally published in my 2015 article “‘Wicked’ women in contemporary pop culture” (Text & Talk 35/4). Chapter 6 uses material from case studies of the Australian TV series Redfern Now, namely a 2020 journal article (International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 25/4) and a journal article in the Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia (Vol.12, No.1–2, 2021). The first case study in Chapter 7 comes from a section in my 2018 book Language and Television Series, while the second case study in that chapter has not previously been published. All case studies in Chapters 1–6 have been substantially recontextualised, updated, edited, and considerably developed and extended, incorporating new corpus linguistic analyses.

I want to give special thanks to Susan Reichelt for allowing me to refer to her work on the Gilmore Girls “reboot” in Chapter 3, and for providing relevant figures. I am grateful to the various colleagues in Australia and internationally who influenced my work, assisted in my research, or commented on the publications on which this book builds. These colleagues are listed by name in the relevant prior publications. I also want to thank the reviewers who provided constructive feedback on these publications as part of the anonymous peer review process. Additional thanks go to the (anonymous) scholar who reviewed this book manuscript. Further, I am grateful to the book series editor Ute Römer and the whole team at John Benjamins for seeing this book through to publication. For contributions to corpus building, I would like to express my thanks to Mark Assad (character-based corpora in Chapter 3), David Caldwell, Ganna Veselovska, and students in Language and Identity (corpora in Chapter 4). For assistance with corpus building for Chapters 6 and 7 I thank Kelvin Lee, Tim Bishop, Elena Sheard and especially Georgia Carr, who undertook the bulk of corpus transcription and editing. I am grateful to the University of Sydney’s sustained support and funding for my research which has enabled some of these corpora to be built. Additional thanks go to Kelvin Lee for assisting in checking and formatting references.

Last but not least, I want to express my deepest thanks to my partner Helen Caple, for her continued support in all my research endeavours and beyond.