Spontaneity reloaded: American face-to-face and movie conversation compared

This paper is an empirical investigation of the linguistic features characterizing American face–to–face and movie conversation, two domains which are usually claimed to differ in terms of spontaneity. Natural conversation is, indeed, considered the quintessence of the spoken language for it is totally spontaneous, whereas movie conversation is usually described as non–spontaneous, being artificially written–to–be–spoken and, thus, not likely to represent the general usage of conversation. However, empirical evidence from Multi–Dimensional and mono–analyses shows that the two conversational domains do not differ to a great extent. The claim that movie language has a very limited value because it does not reflect natural conversation (Sinclair 2004:80) is thus confuted through quantitative and qualitative analyses. The major implication is that movie language can be regarded as a potential source for teaching and learning spoken language features.