The Pragmatics of Spontaneous and Fictional Dialogues

This project studies the characteristics of dialogues across two dimensions that have often been conflated in the past, fictional/non-fictional and spontaneous/scripted. Using a novel kind of data – recordings and transcriptions from improvised theatre performances – comparisons with spontaneous conversation and scripted fiction can show how spontaneity and fictionality influence the form and pragmatic functions of linguistic characteristics like hesitation markers, pauses, discourse markers, stance expressions and repetitions. In addition, the comparison with telecinematic fiction provides new insight into how the presence of the audience and related factors of the communicative framework affect humour and fictional classification. Detailed information on the project can be found on the project website.

As part of the project, the Improv Corpus, a multimodal corpus based on around 50 recordings of improvised theatre performances, is being compiled and will be made accessible to other researchers. The corpus includes detailed discourse transcriptions in XML annotation that are linked to the respective video files through timestamps, enabling multimodal analysis of the data. To date, the majority of the recordings have been collected and the transcription of the material is ongoing. The corpus is unique in providing data from live performed theatre and spontaneous fictional dialogues.