Lexical bundles in mainstream movie'and Noah Baumbach's selected film scripts: a corpus-based study of telecinematic discourse

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate and compare language use in film scripts of American mainstream movies and in Noah Baumbach's, focusing on lexical bundles and their functional contributions to meanings and aesthetic values of the given texts. Two corpora were compiled as the datasets: Mainstream Film Corpus (MFC), which consists of 100 screenplays of top Hollywood blockbusters during 2005-2019, and Noah Baumbach Corpus (NBC), which contains five film scripts written by Noah Baumbach alone. Frequent four-word lexical bundles were extracted and approached qualitatively in terms of their functions, following Biber et al. (2004) and Biber (2006) as analytical frameworks.

Results demonstrate that lexical bundles in MFC and those in NBC are similar in overall distributional patterns of lexical bundle types, with stance bundles topping the lists, followed by referential, special-function and discourse-organizing bundles, respectively. This is argued to reflect shared features of the film script as a register. However, a number of differences between the two corpora were also observed. Crucially, while lexical bundles in MFC highlight dialogue and narrative descriptions of scene, movement and body language in film scripts of mainstream movies, those in NBC feature dialogues, which serve purposes of characterization and character development in Noah Baumbach’s storylines. The study thereby contributes to the growing fields of telecinematic discourse and telecinematic stylistics. Limitations of the study and recommendations for future research are discussed.