A linguistic typology of American television

Abstract This paper presents the first entirely linguistic typology of contemporary American television, derived from a multi-dimensional (MD) analysis of the USTV corpus. The USTV corpus comprises 930 texts from 191 different TV programs, classified into 31 different registers (including nine telecinematic ones: drama series, miniseries, movies, sitcoms, soap operas, general animation, children’s animation, short-feature animation, and children’s and teens’ shows). The linguistic typology we present in this study is based on the linguistic characteristics present in the individual programs, with no a priori textual categorizations. A cluster analysis grouped the individual programs into clusters that shared similar dimensional profiles. The resulting typology comprises nine different text types – namely Presentation of information, Opinion and discussion, Analysis and debate, Description, Interactive recount, Engaging demonstration, Playful discourse, Simplified interaction, and Simulated conversation. The paper discusses and illustrates each text type and considers how telecinematic discourse relates to each of them.