Part of
Dialogue across MediaEdited by Jarmila Mildorf and Bronwen Thomas
[Dialogue Studies 28] 2017
► pp. 37–54
Edited by Jarmila Mildorf and Bronwen Thomas
[Dialogue Studies 28] 2017
► pp. 37–54
Dialogue and character in 21st century TV drama
The case of ‘Sherlock Holmes’
The successful British-made TV drama series Sherlock (BBC 2011-present) is one of the latest in a long sequence of dramatisations of the Victorian short stories and novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This chapter discusses some passages of dialogue from the first episode of this series, demonstrating how the character is created and maintained, focusing in particular on Sherlock’s antisocial tendencies, his eccentricity and his remarkable deductive powers. The analysis further seeks to isolate the distinctive contribution of dialogue in this respect from other aspects of audiovisual production, drawing as appropriate on the sociolinguistics of stance, politeness theory and conversational analysis.
References
Androutsopoulos, Jannis
2012 Language and Society in Cinematic Discourse. Special issue of Multilingua – Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication 31: (2/3).
Bednarek, Monika
2012 The Language of Fictional Television: Drama and Identity. London: Continuum.
2011 Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson
1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Burton, Deirdre
1980 Dialogue and Discourse: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Modern Drama Dialogue and Naturally Occurring Conversation. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Culpeper, Jonathan
2001 Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts. Harlow: Longman.
Engebretson, Robert
Grice, H. Paul
1975 “Logic and Conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics, III: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 41-58. New York: Academic Press.
Herman, Vimala
1998 Dramatic Discourse: Dialogue as Interaction in Plays. London: Routledge.
Jaffe, Alexandra
2009 Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kozloff, Sarah
2000 Overhearing Film Dialogue. University of California Press.
McIntyre, Dan
2008 “Integrating Multimodal Analysis and the Stylistics of Drama: A Multimodal Perspective on Ian McKellen’s Richard III.” Language and Literature, 17 (4): 309-334.
Richardson, Kay
2010 Television Dramatic Dialogue: A Sociolinguistic Study. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson
1974 “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-taking for Conversation.” Language 50: 696–735.
Short, Mick
2002 “From Dramatic Text to Dramatic Performance.” In Exploring the Language of Drama: From Text to Context, ed. by Jonathan Culpeper, Mick Short, and Peter Verdonk, 6-18. London: Routledge.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Gibbons, Alison & Sara Whiteley
2021. Do worlds have (fourth) walls? A Text World Theory approach to direct address inFleabag. Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 30:2 ► pp. 105 ff. 
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.