In:Decoding Movie Language through Multi-Dimensional Analysis and the Grammar of Graphics
Pierfranca Forchini
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 124] 2025
► pp. v–vi
Table of contents
AcknowledgementsVII
Introduction1
Chapter 1.Foundations and refinements in movie discourse studies6
1.1Foundations6
1.1.1Movie discourse studies6
1.1.2Biber’s Multi-Dimensional Analysis (MDA)9
1.1.3MDA and its application in movie discourse studies17
1.2Refinements20
1.2.1The updated and expanded American Movie Corpus20
1.2.2The Grammar of Graphics framework30
Chapter 2.Study design: Hypotheses, techniques, and data selection38
2.1Research questions and rationale38
2.2Statistical techniques and visual representations39
2.3Corpora and data selection47
Chapter 3.MDA 1 and graphic visualizations of text types49
3.1The AMC vs. real dialogs, prepared speeches, and official documents49
3.2Single movie dialogs vs. real dialogs, prepared speeches, and official documents58
3.3Discussion of results95
Chapter 4.MDA 2 and graphic visualizations of variables98
4.1Diachronic comparisons98
4.2Genre comparisons143
4.3Linear relationships180
4.4Discussion of results195
Chapter 5.MDA 3 and graphic visualizations of linguistic features200
5.1Linguistic features in movie and real dialogs200
5.2Overall, diachronic, and genre distribution of linguistic features in single movies224
5.3Weight on dimensions228
5.4Discussion of results235
Chapter 6.Validation of the scientific hypotheses240
6.1Research question 1: Do movie dialogs reflect spontaneous conversation in terms of their textuality and linguistic features?240
6.2Research question 2: What is the value of movie dialogs in terms of representing natural conversation?244
6.3Research question 3: Can monomodal movie transcriptions serve as teaching material for spoken features?245
6.4Discussion of results250
Chapter 7.Concluding remarks252
7.1Synthesis of results252
7.2Takeaways and future aspirations255
7.3Limitations and future research directions259
References262
Appendices
Appendix 1.Tags and weights of Dimension 1 linguistic features270
Appendix 2.Comprehensive analysis of Dimension 1 mean scores
and weighted linguistic features in individual movies271
and weighted linguistic features in individual movies271
Appendix 3.Tags and weights of Dimension 2 linguistic features275
Appendix 4.Comprehensive analysis of Dimension 2 mean scores
and weighted linguistic features in individual movies276
and weighted linguistic features in individual movies276
Appendix 5.Tags and weights of Dimension 3 linguistic features278
Appendix 6.Comprehensive analysis of Dimension 3 mean scores
and weighted linguistic features in individual movies279
and weighted linguistic features in individual movies279
Appendix 7.Tags and weights of Dimension 4 linguistic features281
Appendix 8.Comprehensive analysis of Dimension 4 mean scores
and weighted linguistic features in individual movies282
and weighted linguistic features in individual movies282
Appendix 9.Tags and weights of Dimension 5 linguistic features284
Appendix 10.Comprehensive analysis of Dimension 5 mean scores and weighted linguistic features in individual movies285
Appendix 11.Ggplot2 codes for Figures 1 to 94287
Index
