ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief overview of corpus-assisted research on English cinematic speech by illustrating the research questions and methodologies as well as the types of corpora that have been current in the literature on film discourse. It presents a case study whose aim is to show the stability of film discourse. Corpus-assisted studies on film discourse can be roughly divided into four main groups. The first group comprises the contributions that have dealt with the linguistics of original film discourse. The second group consists of the numerous studies that have examined the translation of film dialogue. The third group includes the works that have considered the usefulness of filmic input in second-language teaching/learning. Finally, the fourth group comprises studies on audio description. As C. Mair puts it, corpora belong to two main categories. The linguistic studies on films have indeed tended to rely on smaller, more purpose-specific corpora than the Movie Corpus and the North American Movie Corpus.
