When we watch and listen to actors speaking lines that have been written by someone else, a common experience if we watch any television at all, the illusion of “people talking” is strong. These characters are people like us—or else the illusion would not work—but they are also different, products of a dramatic imagination, and the talk they exchange is also not quite like ours either. This book examines, from an applied sociolinguistic perspective, and with reference to television, the particular kind of “artificial” talk that we know as dialogue: onscreen/on‐mike talk delivered by characters ... More

When we watch and listen to actors speaking lines that have been written by someone else, a common experience if we watch any television at all, the illusion of “people talking” is strong. These characters are people like us—or else the illusion would not work—but they are also different, products of a dramatic imagination, and the talk they exchange is also not quite like ours either. This book examines, from an applied sociolinguistic perspective, and with reference to television, the particular kind of “artificial” talk that we know as dialogue: onscreen/on‐mike talk delivered by characters as part of dramatic storytelling in a range of fictional and nonfictional TV genres. As well as trying to identify the place that this kind of language occupies in sociolinguistic space, it seeks to understand the conditions of its production by screenwriters and the conditions of its reception by audiences, and offers two case studies, one British (Life on Mars) and one American (House).