Barbara Malveira Orfano bmalveira@yahoo.com.br
RESUMO: Este estudo baseado em corpora objetiva revisar e investigar os principais tópicos apresentados no seriado da comédia Friends comparando com exemplos de converas espontaneas. Seguindo as observacoes feitas por Cutting (2000) este tranalho analisa e compara os topicos presentes no seriado Friends tendo o Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken Language como corpusde referencia. Foram utilizadas, na análise, as seguintes ferramentas de análise de corpora eletrônicos: listas de palavras-chaves (keyword lists), listas de clusters (cluster lists) e linhas de concordancia (concordance lines). A pesquisa demonstra como os tópicos preferidos no seriado consequentemente influenciam o discurso no programa trazendo insights interessantes ao estudo de mídia baseado em corpora.
PALAVRAS-CHAVE: corpora; mídia; tópicos e palavras-chaves.
ABSTRACT: The aim of this research is to look at the topics found in the sitcom Friends, comparing some examples to casual conversation. According to Cutting (2000:27) topics need to be addressed following an interactive and pragmatic approach focusing on what speakers say about something that is being talked about. Following Cutting’s (ibid.) observations to the study of topic this paper analysis and compare the topics found in the sitcom using the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken Language as a reference corpus. Following a thorough examination of key word lists and concordances lines the mainstream topics from both corpora are discussed. The results contribute to an ongoing discussion of how corpora research can contribute to media discourse studies.
KEYWORDS: corpora; media; topics and key words.
1. Introduction
According to Brown and Yule (1983:70) topic is one of the most frequently used but least explained terms in the analysis of discourse .This research sets out to investigate the role of the topics presented in the sitcom taking into consideration the fact that the sitcom is broadcast around the world, and thus has a broad participation framework represented by a ‘global audience’. This analysis looks at the topics found in the sitcom, comparing some examples to casual conversation. First, drawing on Gardner’s (1987) framework for the study of topic, we investigate how topics are developed in the sitcom. Secondly, we
45 audit the types of topics found in the programme followed by examples from the Friends corpus and discussion. In this part of the analysis we follow Cutting’s (2000) research on topic in order to identify and classify the topics in the sitcom. It is believed that both Gardner’s (1987) and Cutting’s (2000) work on topic will provide useful insights to the discussion of the linguistic features that determine the topics present in the sitcom. Drawing on the fact that the audience is also seen as part of the community of the show, the present article will also take into consideration the following issues:
i) shared knowledge: topics are usually conveyed from the pool of common knowledge of participants within a particular culture
ii) pragmatics: topics are negotiated and speakers speaking topically seek to make their contributions in accordance with what they think the other participants are talking about (Brown and Yule, 1983:89).
iii) audience: topics must be chosen taking into account the audience’s interpretative schemata, and their expectations. The appropriate choice of topics contributes to the engagement of the audience within the participation framework of a particular show.
2. Data and methodology
This study comprises two corpora. The Friends corpus containing episodes from the sitcom Friends and a sub-corpus from the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken English (after here SBC). The Friends corpus is composed of fourteen episodes from the seventh season that were transcribed and stored for analysis and it has approximately 40,000. The Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken Language has the same size of the main corpus and it has dialogues containing conversations among close friends that were carefully chosen in order to be representative and comparable to the main corpus.
At first, an observation from the key-word list pointed out the items that were indicating the possible relevant topics present in the sitcom. After this analysis, each scene was isolated and manually topics were classified. This topic classification confirmed that the results from the key- word list were indicating the most common topics in the sitcom and their importance in the overall narrative of the show. Following this observation in
46 order to identify and characterize topics in Friends, we manually searched the data isolating the topics found in the sitcom.
3. Definition of topic
Before looking more specifically into the topics in Friends, we shall outline some definitions associated with the term topic. Many researchers have tried to pin down a definition of topic, but there are still many ongoing debates about what a topic is. Gardner (1987:129) emphasises that there are substantial problems in assigning the extent to which topic is crucial in the structuring of discourse. According to Gardner (ibid: 132.) native speakers seem to have an intuitive knowledge of topic as they usually summarise the topic of a conversation in a single sentence posing problems to a more systematic study of topics. However, O’Keeffe (2003) puts forward the idea that the ‘notion of topic is both a process and product of generic activity within a given participation framework’ (ibid: 111). The participation framework in Friends, due to the global nature of the show’s audience, is very broad and this plays a crucial role in the topics chosen by scriptwriters in the sitcom.
Brown and Yule's (1983) definition of topic proposes a ‘characterisation of topic that allows expressions and titles to be considered incorporating all reasonable judgments of what is being talked about’ (ibid: 75). This definition is in line with Cutting (2000) who observes that a topic can be given a title that is an embedded question such as ‘Why X happened’ or ‘How to do Y’ (ibid:27). Extract 1 gives an example of what a topic is following Cutting`s (2000) approach to topic.
Extract 1) Monica decides to make candies for her neighbours in order to