Routines as social pleasantries in period dramas: a corpus linguistic analysis

This paper investigates the role of two conversational routines, greetings and leave-takings, in the dialogues of two period dramas (Downton Abbey, 2010-2015; and Upstairs Downstairs, 2010-2012). We aim to show which resources are exploited in television dialogue to construct politeness in interaction given the multiple requirements of the setting of the series under consideration and of television lan-guage in general. To do this, we analyze a corpus of 155,235 words of TV series screenplays (104,191 from Downton Abbey and 51,044 from Upstairs Downstairs), relying on corpus linguistics methodology – both corpus-based and corpus-driven – in order to establish how much narrative space they are granted, which specifi c linguistic fea-specific linguistic fea-tures they have, how frequent conventional expressions are used, and which differences emerge across text types and time.