ABSTRACT
Dialogue is an essential part of the multimodal and multisemiotic complex of film. It simultaneously provides background knowledge, defines characters, verbalises their beliefs and emotions and involves and entertains viewers. Most importantly, it is paramount to both film narration and realism, hence calling for in-depth linguistic analysis. Among several theoretical and descriptive approaches, corpus linguistics contributes a powerful methodological apparatus that offers a unique means to look for film dialogue's recurring and distinctive patterns empirically. As corpora of film language have been growing in number and size, researchers have broaden the questions they have investigated to highlight both the similarities between film dialogue and spoken language and the specificities of the register. Among these, special attention in the chapter is paid to a group of privileged carriers of orality in screen dialogue: deictic expressions, interrogatives and vocatives. Since films travel easily across language borders to become available to large international audiences, translated film language brings to the fore additional factors to consider in corpus linguistics studies.
