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Abstract
Film has been used widely as a resource in second and foreign language classrooms - mainly for the teaching of listening and speaking skills - and some have argued that it represents a useful resource for teaching pragmatics. Film is also an essentially unexplored potential resource for research on discourse and pragmatics. A central issue in the use of film for language teaching and research is that of validity: how well does film language represent the ways that people actually talk? This paper examines a corpus of compliments and compliment responses excerpted from forty American feature films, comparing their realization to naturally-occurring data from the available speech act literature. Results indicate that film language appears to be most representative of naturally-occurring speech from a pragmalinguistic perspective - particularly where major categories such as syntactic formula in compliments is concerned - and less so in terms of sociopragmatics.
1. Introduction
This paper explores the viability of film as a resource for pragmatics research and language teaching by analyzing a corpus of compliments and compliments collected from forty American feature films. To establish the validity of language used in film, the film data is compared with naturally-occurring compliments and compliment responses from existing studies for features such as syntactic formula, adjective choice, gender distribution in giving compliments, compliment topic, and choice of compliment response strategy. Before discussing in detail how the film data were collected and analyzed, the paper begins with a short account of the role that film (and other fictional sources) has played (or might play) in language teaching and in research in pragmatics. While little work has been done in either of these areas, the literature does offer some useful discussion. Following this is a brief treatment of the speech acts of focus - compliments and compliment responses - which are among the best represented in the literature, and also boast comparatively large corpora of naturally-occurring speech. These corpora provide a good deal of useful information on the use of compliments and compliments responses in American English, and so provide robust sources of comparison for the film data. Finally, the film corpus is discussed and analyzed, and the findings are presented, together with implications for pragmatics research and teaching.
2. Film and...