ABSTRACTS Stylistic Approaches to Pop Culture

International Conference
                           Stylistic Approaches to Pop Culture
                                           (19–20 March 2020)

                                             ABSTRACTS
Kristy Beers Fägersten (Södertörn University)
Monika Bednarek (University of Sydney)
From D’oh! to Don’t fuck it up! The Evolution of Swearing in Television
Catchphrases
This paper explores television catchphrases, understood as recurring utterances that are
psychologically salient and often associated with specific characters, such as Homer Simpson‟s
catchphrase D’oh! We first present 120 popular catchphrases over a 60-year period of US-
television broadcasting, collected according to available curated lists1. The paper then focuses on
categorising these catchphrases into functions identified previously for swearing (Stapleton
2010). This categorisation, in turn, makes possible both an exploration of the hypothesis put
forth by Bednarek (2010: 137) that expressive resources are more often used as catchphrases,
and an investigation of how catchphrases have paved the way for swearing on television, in the
form of „swearing catchphrases‟.
        Catchphrases in particular lend themselves to appropriation, and are often repurposed in
subsequent discourse. The catchphrase format and its multi-functionality as characterization and
construction of identity as well as humor (Bednarek 2018, 2019) render it both more palatable to
a television audience and more compatible to television norms, thus mitigating the use of swear
words on broadcast television. Indeed, though swearing on US-American television remains a
linguistic frontier, it is one that nevertheless is gradually being breached. Instances of swearing,
in particular catchphrase swearing, highlight new norms of television (Beers Fägersten 2014,
2017), ushered in by pay television models such as cable and streaming services. Although not
beholden to network broadcasting standards, pay television is nevertheless an example of mass
media and as such, it may still be subject to lingering associations between television and
standard language usage prescribed to by the viewing audience. Ultimately, catchphrase
swearing may play a role in swear words seeping ever more saliently into network programming.

References
Bednarek, Monika. 2010. The language of fictional television: Drama and identity. London:
      Continuum.
Bednarek, Monika. 2018. Language and television series: A linguistic approach to TV dialogue.
      Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bednarek, Monika. 2019. The multifunctionality of swear/taboo words in television series. In J.
      Lachlan Mackenzie & Laura Alba-Juez (eds.), Emotion in discourse, 29-54. Amsterdam:
      John Benjamins.

1
    such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_catchphrases

Beers Fägersten, Kristy. 2014. The use of English swear words in Swedish media. In Marianne
       Rathje (ed.), Swearing in the Nordic countries, 63-82. Copenhagen: Dansk Sprognævn.
Beers Fägersten, Kristy. 2017. FUCK CANCER, Fucking Åmål, Aldrig fucka upp: The
       standardization of fuck in Swedish media. In Kristy Beers Fägersten & Karyn Stapleton
       (eds.), Advances in swearing research: New languages and new contexts, 87-106.
       Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Stapleton, Karyn. 2010. Swearing. In Miriam A. Locher & Sage L. Graham (eds.), Interpersonal
       pragmatics, 289-306. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Cecelia Cutler (City University of New York)
Styling Working Class Accents in Early Twentieth-Century American print
cartoons
The New York “accent” is one of the widely recognized and iconic of American dialects or
language varieties, appearing in the speech of countless film, television, radio, book, and cartoon
characters. Departing from studies of English in New York City that mainly focus on phonology
(Cogshall & Becker 2009; Newman 2014), and adopting a sociolinguistics of writing approach
(Blommaert 2013; Jaffe, Androutsopoulos, Sebba & Johnson 2012; Lillis & McKinney 2013) the
current project examines linguistic signs that are about the pragmatic code and how to interpret
the extrasemantic meanings encoded in speech. For this paper, I examine renditions of
vernacular New York City speech in a corpus of early twentieth-century American print cartoons
by Winsor McCay. The corpus consists of 421 issues of the comic strip “Little Nemo” from the
Internet Archive. The cartoon appeared in The New York Herald from 1905 to 1911 and later in
the New York American from 1911 to 1914. It features a little boy, “Nemo” who falls asleep in
each episode and dreams of travelling to Slumberland, but his journey is often frustrated by the
green-skinned, cigar-smoking Flip, a trickster who can summon his uncle, the Sun to end
Nemo‟s dream. While Nemo represents respectable, middle class boyhood, working class Flip is
the “reckless yet engaging agent propelling the narrative forward” (Roeder 2014: 74). The paper
examines which vernacular features are used most often by Flip (e.g. stopping of interdental
fricatives; ING > IN‟; -AGR, and various lexical expressions), and illustrates how these features
and social identities associated them come to be socially recognized or “enregistered” (Agha
2005) as indexical of a certain set of working class attributes.

References
Agha, Asif. 2005. Voice, footing, enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1). 38-
      59.
Blommaert, Jan. 2013. Writing as a sociolinguistic object. Journal of Sociolinguistics 17(4). 440-
      459.
Coggshall, Elizabeth. L. & Becker, Kara. 2009. The vowel phonologies of African American and
      White New York City residents. Publication of the American Dialect Society 94(1). 101-
      128.

Jaffe, Alexandra., Jannis Androutsopoulos, Mark Sebba & Sally Johnson (eds.). 2012.
        Orthography as social action: Scripts, spelling, identity and power (Vol. 3). Berlin:
        Mouton de Gruyter.
Lillis, Teresa & Carolyn McKinney. 2013. The sociolinguistics of writing in a global context:
        Objects, lenses, consequences. Journal of Sociolinguistics 17(4). 415-439.
McCay,          Winsor.       Little      Nemo         1905–1914.          Internet Archive,
        http://www.comicstriplibrary.org/images/comics/little-nemo/little-nemo.
Newman, Michael. 2014. New York City English (Vol. 10). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Roeder, Katherine. 2014. Wide awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, mass culture, and modernism in
        the art of Winsor McCay. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Anika Gerfer (University of Münster)
“Rainy Days dem Gone”: Crossing and the Stylization of Jamaican Creole in
Reggae and Dancehall Music
The status of Jamaican Creole (JC), which had long been associated with the language of the
slaves and considered as „broken‟ English, has changed during the last couple of decades. The
most important driving forces behind JC‟s development into a globally prestigious linguistic
resource are the worldwide popularity of Jamaican pop music and the growing appeal of the
Rastafari movement. For instance, German (Westphal 2018) and other European reggae artists
„cross‟ (Rampton 1995) into JC when singing to index belonging to the global reggae
community and pay tribute to Jamaican culture and language (Gerfer 2018). This Eurocentric
perspective, however, neglects the considerable impact of JC on artists from across the globe.
This study therefore adds to the sociolinguistics of globalization and performance by examining
which features of JC are used by Jamaican and non-Jamaican reggae and dancehall artists with
different linguistic backgrounds, and which factors influence their stylization of JC. For this
purpose, a corpus of more than 180 reggae and dancehall lyrics from seven Jamaican and 20
non-Jamaican artists was compiled, providing the basis for a morpho-syntactic, phonetic, and
lexical analysis. The results show that while ENL artists only use a limited repertoire of
stereotypical JC features, the singing style of EFL and ESL artists is comparable to that of the
Jamaican performers in the sample. Furthermore, music genre and linguistic background seem to
affect the non-Jamaican artists‟ use of JC. Dancehall artists, in contrast to reggae artists, tend to
use a large repertoire of JC features on different levels of linguistic variation with high
frequencies. These findings contrast with earlier studies on crossing which found that crossers
tend to choose only a few socially significant and globally prominent variants due to lack of
proficiency (cf. Cutler 2003). The present study, therefore, suggests that non-Jamaican ESL and
EFL artists skillfully use a wide range of stylized JC in their reggae and dancehall performances.

References
Cutler, Cecelia. 2003. Yorkville Crossing: white teens, hip hop and African American English.
        In Roxy Harris (ed.), The language, ethnicity and race reader, 314-327. London:
        Routledge.

Gerfer, Anika. 2018. Global reggae and the appropriation of Jamaican Creole. World Englishes
       37(4). 668-683.
Rampton, Ben. 1995. Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents. London: Longman.
Westphal, Michael. 2018. Pop culture and the globalization of non-standard varieties of English:
       Jamaican Creole in German reggae subculture. In Valentin Werner (ed.), The language of
       pop culture, 97-115. New York: Routledge.

Christiana Gregoriou (University of Leeds)
From Scribble to Crime Novel: A Stylistic Approach to the Crime Fiction
Writing Process
Crime fiction is the art of misdirection. Crucial to its craft and popularity is the „fair play rule‟:
the notion that observant readers should be able to solve the crime at the detective story‟s heart
despite the author‟s determined attempt to direct them away from evidence. But how do crime
writers confront the challenge of securing fair play? This talk investigates this crucial concern
through a stylistic approach to a hitherto unexamined Leeds University special collection archive
pertaining to contemporary crime writers‟ creative process materials. It examines their various
ways of (re)making misdirection in order to uphold the generic fulcrum of „fair play‟. More
specifically, this talk explores an early novel draft, annotations and notebook material produced
by Peter Robinson and his editor in conjunction with his Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks
crime series‟ first novel (2004) [1987] Gallows View. In so doing, it investigates the (re)making
of misdirection through the employment of strategies (Emmott & Alexander 2010, 2014)
designed to control and manipulate reader attention. Such stylistic study (engaging with schema
theory, but also linguistic foregrounding and backgrounding, grammar, and even metaphor and
inferencing) allows an analyst to interrogate how this misdirecting happens and, hence, trace
how a novel‟s published version came to misdirect a reader away from characters who turn out
to be criminally and appropriately significant. Further to investigating the strategizing behind the
backgrounding of important and foregrounding of unimportant elements, the talk also uncovers
the stylistic (re)making of a technique through which an author comes to attach displaced or false
significance to a plot-significant item.

References
Emmott, Catherine & Marc Alexander. 2010. Detective fiction, plot construction, and reader
      manipulation: Rhetorical control and cognitive misdirection in Agatha Christie‟s
      Sparkling Cyanide. In Dan McIntyre & Beatrix Busse (eds.), Language and style: In
      honour of Mick Short, 328-346. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Emmott, Catherine & Marc Alexander. 2014. Foregrounding, burying, and plot construction. In
      Peter Stockwell & Sara Whiteley (eds.), The handbook of stylistics, 329-343. Cambridge:
      Cambridge University Press.
Robinson, Peter. 2004 [1987]. Gallows view. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Christian R. Hoffmann (University of Augsburg)
“Hello…? Who is this?” – The Art of Turn-Taking in Movie Telephone Calls
Early research in conversation analysis has explored phone call openings and closings, exposing
the conversational conventions that govern the production of social order in both mundane and
specialised settings (Sacks 1992; Schegloff 1968, 1979; Button 1990; Zimmerman 1992). Ever
since, linguists have continually returned to the study of phone calls, with a view to their
particular forms, topics and functions (Raymond & Zimmerman 2016; Sikveland, Stokoe &
Symonds 2016; Maschler & Dori-Hacohen 2018), including cross-cultural differences (Hopper
1992; Placencia 1992; Luke & Pavlidou 2002; Grieve 2008) and their use in different
technological extensions, e.g. mobile and/or video-calls (Hutchby & Barnett 2005; Hutchby
2013; Sidoni 2014; Diemer & Brunner 2018). Despite the considerable breadth and reach of
linguistic research on phone calls in naturally occurring discourse, surprisingly little is known
about phone calls in fiction. With a few notable exceptions (Thomas 1997; O‟Halloran 2019),
stylistic research on scripted phone calls in plays, prose or movies is equally scarce. To this end,
this paper sets out to explore the turn-taking design of fictional phone calls in feature films,
based on a phone call corpus of 250 different phone call conversations classified in three
different film genres (action/thriller, comedy and horror films). Looking at genre, forms and
functions, I aim to capture recurring sequential patterns in opening and closing sections, e.g.
summon responses, vocatives, greetings, topic starters, topic bounding sequences) and link them
to their particular (narrative) purposes. The paper also shows that, in movies, shot selection and
editing choices often impose on the design of turn-taking in phone calls. This does not only set
them apart from their naturally occurring counterparts but also turns them into very practical
storytelling devices.

References
Button, Graham. 1990. On varieties of closings. In George Psathas (ed.), Interaction competence,
       93-147. Washington: University Press of America.
Diemer, Stefan, & Marie-Louise Brunner. 2018. You are struggling forwards, and you don‟t
       know, and then you… you do code-switching: Code-switching in ELF Skype
       conversations. Journal of English as a Lingua Franca 7(1). 59-88.
       https://doi.org/10.1515/jelf-2018-0003.
Grieve, Averil & Ingrid Seebus. 2008. G‟day or Guten Tag?: A cross-cultural study of Australian
       and German telephone openings. Journal of Pragmatics 40(7). 1323-1343.
       https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2007.11.005
Hopper, Robert. 1992. Telephone conversation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
       https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500018479.
Hutchby, Ian. 2013. Conversation and technology: From the telephone to the Internet.
       Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hutchby, Ian & Simone Barnett. 2005. Aspects of the sequential organization of mobile phone
       conversation. Discourse Studies 7(2). 147-171. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461456050
       50364.

Luke, Kang Kwong & Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou (eds.). 2002. Telephone calls: Unity and
       diversity in conversational structure across languages and cultures. Amsterdam: John
       Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.101.
Maschler, Yael & Gonen Dori-Hacohen. 2018. Constructing a genre: Hebrew (‟ani) lo yode‟a /
       lo yoda‟at ‟(I) don‟t know‟ on Israeli political radio phone-ins. Text & Talk 38(5). 575-
       604.https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2018-0015.
O‟Halloran, Kieran. 2019. Filming a poem with a mobile phone and an intensive multiplicity: A
       creative pedagogy using stylistic analysis. Language and Literature 28(2). 133-158.
       https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947019828232.
Placencia, Maria E. 1992. Politeness in mediated telephone conversations in Ecuadorian Spanish
       and      British     English.    Language        Learning     Journal     6(1).     80-82.
       https://doi.org/10.1080/09571739285200541.
Raymond, Geoffrey & Don H. Zimmerman. 2016. Closing matters: Alignment and misalignment
       in sequence and call closings in institutional interaction. Discourse Studies 18(6). 716-
       736.https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445616667141.
Sacks, Harvey. 1992. A single instance of a phone-call opening. In Gail Jefferson (ed.), Lectures
       on conversation 2, 542-553. Oxford: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444328301.
Schegloff, Emanuel. 1968. Sequencing in conversational openings. American Anthropologist 70.
       1075-1095. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1968.70.6.02a00030.
Schegloff, Emanuel. 1979. Identification and recognition in telephone conversation openings. In
       George Psathas (ed.), Everyday language: Studies in ethnomethodology, 23-78. New
       York: Irvington.
Sidoni, Maria Grazia. 2014. Through the looking glass: A social semiotic and linguistic
       perspective on the study of video chats. Text & Talk 34(3). 325-347.
       https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2014-0006
Sikveland, Rein, Elizabeth Stokoe & Jon Symonds. 2016. Patient burden during appointment-
       making telephone calls to GP practices. Patient Education and Counseling 99(8).1310-
       1318. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2016.03.025.
Thomas. Bronwen E. 1997. ‟It‟s good to talk‟? An analysis of a telephone conversation from
       Evelyn Waugh‟s Vile Bodies. Language and Literature. 6(2). 105-119.
Zimmerman, Don H. 1992. Achieving context: Openings in emergency calls. In Graham Watson
       & Robert M Seiler (eds.), Text in context: Contributions to ethnomethodology, 406-432.
       London: Sage.

Lisa Jansen (University of Münster)
Performance and Perception: Exploring Linguistic Stylization in English Pop
and Rock
Singers and audience alike are used to hearing an American singing style in pop and rock music.
Most sociolinguistic studies of music have focused on the production side of performances and
discussed various motivations of artists‟ stylistic choices, i.e. to Americanize or choose their
vernacular voice (Trudgill 1982; O‟Hanlon 2006; Beal 2009). However, the audience‟s role has

been widely neglected. In light of this research gap, British and American students‟ perceptions
of and attitudes toward singing styles were elicited with 50 guided interviews based on ten music
stimuli. A qualitative content analysis of said interviews generated various codes, which were
clustered and led to the identification of attitudes toward an Americanized singing style and local
British accents. The major aims were to find out 1. which features, language-wise and other, are
perceived as particularly British and/or American and 2. which associations are triggered with
the stylized accents performed. The results demonstrate that apart from phonetic features, genre,
and content prove important for the evaluative process. Attitudes expressed through
metalinguistic descriptions show that the British interviewees have an ambiguous relationship
with an Americanized singing style and adopt the position of the underdog against the dominant
American cultural mainstream. On the one hand, it is considered (internationally) appealing, fun,
and more marketable, while on the other, it is associated with incorrectness, bad pronunciation,
and a money-making agenda. More than anything else, an Americanized singing style is
associated with the aim of economic gain over artistic integrity. Local accents are considered a
stance against the institutionalized American style and in general reviewed favorably. The
qualitative data analysis gives insight into how nuanced and complex the interviewees‟ thoughts
on music performances and language styles are and that their evaluation plays a crucial role in
language-ideological processes and the forming of indexical fields.

References
Beal, Joan C. 2009. “You‟re not from New York City, you‟re from Rotherham”: Dialect and
       identity in British indie music. Journal of English Linguistics 37(3). 223-240.
O‟Hanlon, Renae. 2006. Australian hip hop: A sociolinguistic investigation. Australian Journal
       of Linguistics 26(2). 193-209.
Trudgill, Peter. 1982. On dialect: Social and geographical perspectives. Oxford: Blackwell.

Dan McIntyre (University of Huddersfield)
Corpora, Cognition and Characterisation: Inferring Character from Subtitles
in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
This talk considers how corpus-based stylistics can be used to support the cognitive stylistic
analysis of characterisation in TV and film drama. In particular, I explore how corpus methods
can be used to investigate the impact on characterisation of intralingual subtitling. Intralingual
subtitling refers to the practice of providing subtitles in the same language as the original
dialogue in a film or TV programme (cf. interlingual subtitling which is the process of
translating dialogue into a different language). Since the primary purpose of intralingual
subtitling is to make TV and film accessible for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, it is important
to ensure that the viewing experience for subtitle users is a close to that of hearing viewers as
possible. And since characterisation is partly a linguistic process, this inevitably necessitates
some consideration of how linguistic indicators of characterisation in dialogue are transferred to
the corresponding subtitles. The case study in this talk shows how corpus methods can be used to
study the extent to which this happens. I argue that using corpus stylistic techniques for this

purpose has a potential practical value, since insights arising from such analyses can be used to
inform the improvement of subtitling practices. I illustrate this through a case study of
characterisation triggers in the 1979 BBC TV series Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Hopcraft 1979) I
also discuss my reasons behind this choice of text). In particular, I discuss how to deal with low
frequency items in a corpus analysis, stressing the importance of qualitative stylistic analyses of
samples from the corpus. Consequently, my analysis combines quantitative and qualitative
methods and is informed by an influential cognitive stylistic model of the characterisation
process. What this case study also does is demonstrate a different analytical approach to null
hypothesis significance testing. In the case of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, we know from the
outset that there are differences between the dialogue and the subtitles. And we know that these
differences are the result of decisions made by the subtitler. What I concentrate on in my analysis
is effect size, in order to determine the scale of such differences. In particular, the case study
demonstrates one aspect in particular of corpus stylistic research. This is the application of
stylistic frameworks in the qualitative analysis of corpus-derived data.

Susan Reichelt (University of Greifswald)
A Mixed-Method Analysis of Autism Spectrum Disorder Representation in
Fictional Television
In this paper, I investigate the stylistic resources employed in the representation of autism
spectrum disorder (ASD) in the fictional television series Parenthood (Katims 2010). Previous
accounts of ASD representation in fictional contexts found a predominantly stereotypical
portrayal that focused on diagnosed characters as savant, compulsive, socially awkward and
overly literal (see Belcher & Maich 2014; Draaisma 2009). While stereotypical characterization
enables storytellers to rely on recognizable patterns and quick audience engagement, such
representations miss the mark of showing a diverse ensemble and might even be harmful for
those who feel misrepresented. Here, an attempt is made to uncover characterization patterns that
go beyond these stereotypes. Two approaches, based on Androutsopoulos‟ multi-levelled
framework (2012: 301-302), are used to tease apart linguistic and multimodal resources that
cater to ASD-relevant patterns of pragmatic competence (Landa 2000; Volden, Coolican, Garon,
White & Bryson 2009; Lam & Yeung 2012), each focusing on the diagnosed character as well as
the surrounding ensemble. An initial quantitative character analysis compares the use of
pragmatic devices used by the characters to see whether frequency distinctions support a
previously claimed othering of the diagnosed character (cf. Holton 2013). Following that, a
detailed scene analysis highlights multimodal aspects that contribute to characterization patterns,
including gaze, body movement, general scene composition, and sound. Findings suggest that
common stereotypes remain apparent throughout but that these are countered with more nuanced
and less salient features, resulting in an overall more rounded representation. A final evaluation
contextualizes this case study within a set of broader questions on representation of diversity in
telecinematic contexts.

References
Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2012. Repertoires, characters and scenes: Sociolinguistic difference in
       Turkish German comedy. Multilingua 31(2/3). 301-326. https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-
       2012-0014.
Belcher, Christina & Kimberly Maich. 2014. Autism spectrum disorder in popular media:
       Storied reflections of societal views. Brock Education 23(2). 97-115.
Draaisma, Douwe. 2009. Stereotypes of autism. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
       B: Biological Sciences 364(1522). 1475-1480. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2008.0324
Holton, Avery E. 2013. What‟s wrong with Max? Parenthood and the portrayal of autism
       spectrum disorders. Journal of Communication Inquiry 37(1). 45-63.
       https://doi.org/10.1177/0196859912472507
Katims, Jason. 2010. Parenthood [television series]. New York: NBC Universal Television.
Lam, Yam Grace & Siu Sze Yeung. 2012. Towards a convergent account of pragmatic language
       deficits in children with high-functioning autism: Depicting the phenotype using the
       Pragmatic Rating Scale. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders 6. 792-797.
       https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rasd.2011.08.004
Landa, Rebecca. 2000. Social language use in Asperger syndrome and high-functioning autism.
       In Ami Klin, Fred R. Volkmar & Sara S. Sparrow (eds.), Asperger syndrome, 125-158.
       New York: Guildford Press.
Volden, Joanne, Jamesie Coolican, Nancy Garon, Julie White & Susan Bryson. 2009. Pragmatic
       language in autism spectrum disorder: relationships to measures of ability and disability.
       Journal      of     Autism      and     Developmental      Disorders    39.     388-393.
       https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-008-0618-y

Dušan Stamenković (University of Niš)
The Stylistic Journey of a Video Game: Multimodality and the Football
Manager Series (2005-2019)
The study investigates the stylistic development of the Football Manager video game series by
exploring changes in game design and video game affordances in a diachronic manner. It focuses
on document-like video game screens from three instances of the series (FM2007, FM2013,
FM2019, Sports Interactive 2006, 2008 & 2018), each of them illustrating one stage in the game
development. The screens (canvases and subcanvases) are approached in a way similar to
Stamenković and Jaćević (2019, based on Bateman 2008 and Bateman, Wildfeuer & Hiippala
2017), but the study employs a less sensitive annotation. It also draws on the recent diachronic
approaches to multimodality, i.e. to tracking changes in the genre profiles, image types, and text-
image relations (Pflaeging 2017; Stöckl 2017), and identifies and analyses the main changes in
several screens. Belonging to the genre of sports management simulations, the series heavily
relies on combining textual and pictorial elements in communicating with the user. The ways in
which these are combined and used have changed in the previous two decades, and this, among
other elements, has resulted in changing the style of the game style significantly. The results
indicate several notable changes in the visual style of Football Manager: the overall percentage

of text-only elements is decreasing, the pictorial and multimodal elements are becoming more
dominant (visuals are taking centre stage, cf. Stöckl 2019), there is a growing diversity in
subcanvas profiles (although the overall number of subcanvases is decreasing). These changes
are likely to reflect more general cultural, social and technological trends. This approach to style
in video games and the notion of adding video games to the list of possible stylistic research
corpora might contribute to the growing field of multimodal stylistics (e.g. Nørgaard 2019).

References:
Bateman, John A. 2008. Multimodality and genre: A foundation for the systematic analysis of
       multimodal documents. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bateman, John A., Janina Wildfeuer & Tuomo Hiippala. 2017. Multimodality: Foundations,
       research and analysis – A problem-oriented introduction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Nørgaard, Nina. 2019. Multimodal stylistics of the novel: More than words. New York:
       Routledge.
Pflaeging, Jana. 2017. Communicative potentials and their use: The case of popular science
       journalism. In Alexander Brock & Peter Schildhauer (eds.), Communication forms and
       communicative practices: New perspectives on communication forms, affordances and
       what users make of them, 181-208. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang.
Sports Interactive. 2006. Football manager 2007. London: Sega Europe.
Sports Interactive. 2012. Football manager 2013. London: Sega Europe.
Sports Interactive. 2018. Football manager 2019. London: Sega Europe.
Stamenković, Dušan & Milan Jaćević. 2019. Video games and multimodality: Exploring
       interfaces and analyzing video screens using the GeM model. In Janina Wildfeuer, Jana
       Pflaeging, John Bateman, Ognyan Seizov & Chiao-I Tseng (eds.), Multimodality:
       Disciplinary thoughts and the challenge of diversity, 277-294. Berlin: Mouton de
       Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110608694-011,
Stöckl, Hartmut. 2017. Multimodality in a diachronic light tracking changes in text-image
       relations within the genre profile of the “MIT Technology Review”. Discourse, Context
       & Media 20. 262-275. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2017.07.001.
Stöckl, Hartmut. 2019. Image-centricity – When visuals take centre stage: Analyses and
       interpretations of a current (news) media practice. In Hartmut Stöckl, Helen Caple & Jana
       Pflaeging (eds.), Shifts towards image-centricity in contemporary multimodal practices,
       19-41. New York: Routledge.

Joe Trotta (University of Gothenburg)
Corpus Stylistics and Pop Culture: A Perfect Marriage for Degree Essays in
English Linguistics?
In this presentation, I discuss the advantages of utilizing language evidenced in pop culture as
the primary data in BA-degree thesis projects in linguistics, with a focus on advanced students of
English as a foreign language (EFL). After a cursory overview of some of the (known and lesser-
known) pros- and cons- of using the language of pop culture (or LPC) for BA theses, I

emphasize the value of a corpus approach to LPC data. Though BA-thesis authors are nascent
researchers, I maintain that when this kind of data is responsibly supervised, it sets the
groundwork for better engagement with linguistic theories and methods on the whole, and, more
specifically in the context of this presentation, the use of LPC presents a natural platform to
introduce students to the advantages of corpus tools in providing a useful, reliable and valid
analysis of such data. Given the background and nature of a BA-thesis in English linguistics for
EFL students, whose coursework leading up to the BA thesis has focused not only on language
studies, but also on culture and literature, a corpus-stylistic analysis emerges as a viable and
desirable option for a thesis. In line with Vygotskyan principles, it seems self-evident that
students achieve better outcomes when they can integrate their interests and their knowledge
with new material. With a corpus-stylistic approach, they can work systematically with material
that triggers their curiosity and engages them; with proper instruction to corpus tools and the
possibilities afforded, they learn how to synthesize quantitative and qualitative perspectives, take
more responsibility and gain more independence in their work, and have better prerequisites for
producing insightful and high-quality BA theses.

Valentin Werner (University of Bamberg)
Pop Lyrics: A Corpus-Stylistic Analysis
Pop lyrics are a highly relevant form of one-to-many communication, and arguably the epitome
of the language of pop culture (Werner 2012; Bértoli-Dutra 2014). The study presented takes a
largely quantitative corpus-stylistic perspective on pop lyrics in the form of a register analysis.
This serves to address the following overarching research questions:
       i. Where can lyrics (as a particular written-to-be-sung manifestation) be located in
       relation to other text types?
       ii. What are characteristic stylistic properties of lyrics?
The approach used follows the procedure for multidimensional register analysis (MDA)
originally developed by Biber (1988; see also Biber & Conrad 2019) and is based on LYPOP, a
550,000-word corpus of English pop lyrics, totaling 1,842 songs from the period 2001–2016. For
quantitative data analysis, the study relies on the Multidimensional Analysis Tagger (Nini 2018)
to identify register features to contrast lyrics with other registers. Corpus searches were
conducted using the n-gram and keyword features of AntConc (version 3.5.6; Anthony 2018) to
establish register/style markers. Overall, the MDA situates lyrics close to the general text types
conversation and personal letters. As claimed in earlier analyses (e.g. Pettijohn & Sacco 2009), it
emerges that pop lyrics indeed carry some conversational force. Assigning labels such as
“personal rhetoric” (Frith 1996) or “conversational directness” (Durant & Lambrou 2009) to pop
lyrics is supported further by the n-gram (trigram) and keyword analyses (measured against a
reference corpus of general conversation). However, these findings, suggestive of overall
conversationality and informality, stand in stark contrast to other results pertaining both to
genuinely linguistic aspects (such as a conspicuous lack of dysfluencies) and situational factors
(such as the actual social and spatial distance between addressor and addressee(s) not being

reflected linguistically). These discrepancies can largely be ascribed to the specific
circumstances of production (planned and performed) and reception (one-to-many
communication without back-channeling) as well as the amount of audience/referee design (Bell
1984) involved. In addition, register/style markers, such as of the use of musical
tropes/phonesthetic devices (e.g. oh oh oh, la la la, yeah yeah yeah, boom, woo, etc.) and the
presence of rhyme and meter and contribute to the stylistic distinctiveness of pop lyrics.

References
Anthony,       Laurence.      2018.     AntConc     (3.5.6).   Tokyo:     Waseda    University.
        http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/
Bell, Allan. 1984. Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13(2). 145-203.
        https://doi.org/10.1017/S004740450001037X
Bértoli-Dutra, Patrícia. 2014. Multi-dimensional analysis of pop songs. In Tony Berber Sardinha
        & Marcia Veirano Pinto (eds.), Multi-dimensional analysis, 25 years on: A tribute to
        Douglas          Biber,        149-175.        Amsterdam:         John      Benjamins.
        https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.60.05ber
Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University
        Press.
Biber, Douglas & Susan Conrad. 2019. Register, genre, and style. Cambridge: Cambridge
        University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511814358
Durant, Alan & Marina Lambrou. 2009. Language and media. London: Routledge.
Frith, Simon. 1996. Performing rites: Evaluating popular music. Oxford: Oxford University
        Press.
Nini,       Andrea.         2018.       Multidimensional      Analysis      Tagger      (1.3.1).
        http://sites.google.com/site/multidimensionaltagger
Pettijohn, Terry F. & Donald F. Sacco. 2009. The language of lyrics: An analysis of popular
        Billboard songs across conditions of social and economic threat. Journal of Language
        and Social Psychology 28(3). 297-311. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0261927X09335259
Werner, Valentin. 2012. Love is all around: A corpus-based study of pop music lyrics. Corpora
        7(1). 19-50. https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2012.0016

Janina Wildfeuer (University of Groningen)
Embodied Intermediality? Multimodal Metaphors and Blending in Animated
GIFs
This talk will deal with the particular multimodal digital format of the animated GIF (graphics
interchange format) and, more particularly, occurrences of metaphors and blending within this
format that is said to enable new ways of embodied communication in digital contexts. The
starting point is that GIFs are seen as “new digital moments of expressive appropriation”
(Gürsimsek 2016: 331) and that they “can be analyzed as a novel form of embodied reenactment
or demonstration” (Tolins & Samermit 2016: 76). The talk will analyze and discuss critically
whether and how this reenactment is realized by a multitude of semiotic resources depicting

embodied actions of the users or others in specific contexts. A focus will lie on those GIFs that
particularly work with multimodal metaphors or use processes of blending (cf. Bateman 2017).
By looking at several individual examples and delivering an initially qualitatively oriented
multimodal analysis (cf. Bateman, Wildfeuer & Hiippala 2017), the talk will (1) provide a
critical perspective of analyzing embodied intermediality in artefacts and performances of
popular culture. Furthermore, the presented methodological steps for this analysis will (2) build a
basis for a more empirically oriented examination of a larger corpus of GIFs and a broader
perspective on this multimodal digital format.

References
Bateman, John A. 2017. Intermediality in film: A blending-based perspective. In Janina
       Wildfeuer & John A. Bateman (eds.), Film text analysis: New perspectives on the
       analysis of filmic meaning, 141-168. London & New York: Routledge.
Bateman, John A., Janina Wildfeuer & Tuomo Hiippala. 2017. Multimodality: Foundations,
       research, analysis – A problem-oriented introduction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Gürsimsek, Ödul A. 2016. Animated GIFs as vernacular graphic design: Producing Tumblr
       blogs.             Visual          Communication               15(3).          329-349.
       https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357216645481.
Tolins, Jackson & Patrawat Samermit. 2016. GIFs as embodied enactments in text-mediated
       conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction 49(2). 75-91.
       https://doi.org/10..1080/08351813.2016.1164391.