This document discusses predictability of language use in films. It makes three key points: 1) Film language differs from everyday spontaneous talk due to distinct genres, subgenres and "genrelets" that have compulsory and optional linguistic features. 2) Due to these established categories, it is possible to predict what types of language will be used in a given film based on its genre. 3) While films tell stories through moving images, the language used is not as natural as everyday conversation due to its written nature and need to communicate across two channels: verbal and visual. Predictability is largely genre-based.

1. “I knew he’d say that!” A
consideration of the
predictability of language use in
film
Christopher Taylor

2. ?????????
• Three essential premises;
• Particular scene type and particular language
use;
• Distance from day-to-day talk;
• Translation issues.

3. Three essential premisses
• Film language differ from everyday
spontaneous talk;
• Genres, subgenres and genrelets – categories
of language that contain compulsory and
optional features that characterize each one
of them;
• It is possible, due to the first two premises to
predict what will be said.

4. Film language
• “Telling stories through the projection of images”
(Paul and Well’s cinema patent of 1985)
• Even though the advent of cinema brought for
the the first time a storytelling act with pictures
the succeeded one another, flowing in the
screen, it did not make movies language as
natural as spontaneous talk;
• Two channels of communication – verbal and
figurative.

5. Language features in writen, oral and
film dialog

6. Cobuild “Bank of English” spoken
corpus vs film texts

7. Genre
Macrogenres > sub-genres > genrelets

8. Predictability

9. Predictability

10. Conclusion
• Predictability is genre based;
• Absolute values are not often seen except for
cases as “emergency phone calls”(p.10);
• An acceptable range of choices is formed in
each genrelet. It helps to make a group of
options for translators to choose the one that
best fits in a given situation.

12. Reported speech in movies/oral
conversation
Lotman (1979:56) says “Cinema is, by
its very nature, narrative”.
Yule (????) says that Indirect speech has
the narrative function.

13. Reported speech - “be like”

14. “Be like” according to Downing
“Go and be like are becoming widely used as
quotative alternatives to say, both in younger
speakers’ conversation and in the popular
media. Like says and said, go and be like signal
that the speaker is moving into direct speech
mode. Normal combinations of tense and aspect
occur with go and be like; however, the present
tense appears to predominate even for past
time reference (I’m like, she’s like).”

15. “Be like” according to Yule
The use of be like is a way the reporter see to
“aproximate reconstruction rather than na exact
word-for-word account of what was said.” In
addition, the verb tense used express, in Yule’s
approach, that a non-authority person is being
reposted.