Constructing the antihero: Linguistic characterisation in current American television series

Abstract This paper investigates the ways in which immoral villains in contemporary fictional television are linguistically constructed as antiheroes that are appealing and even likeable to a wide mainstream audience. The underlying dataset comprises the first thirteen episodes of each of the three American TV series Breaking Bad, House of Cards, and Dexter. In order to highlight the equivocal status of the protagonists, this study adopts approaches from both cognitive semantics and register theory. The blending of mental spaces in utterances by the antiheroes underlines the fact that they oscillate between diverse social and cognitive domains. In addition, the protagonists are highly versatile in accommodating their linguistic registers to alternating situational contexts. As a result, they are framed as resourceful, multifaceted, and captivating individuals in a way that accounts for the tremendous pop-cultural impact and economic success of these TV shows.