Corpora and movie discourse: Marvel and DC Studios compared

The present work illustrates the significant impact of corpora and authentic data on the study of movie discourse and their potential for teaching spoken language. Conceptually, the chapter is divided into two parts: by way of an introduction, the first part provides an overview of movie discourse studies, illustrating the results achieved with the introduction of Multi-Dimensional Analysis and authentic movie dialog investigations, and points out their usefulness in spoken language teaching. The second part takes its origin from preceding works that have demonstrated the resemblance between movie and face-to-face conversation and investigates authentic dialogs from superhero movies (Marvel and DC Comics) in a comparative light, as an example of suitable corpora for the study of language. What emerges is a clear picture of the nature of movie discourse which is confirmed to reflect face-to-face conversation, regardless of the genre. The findings are another example that confute the various claims about the inadequacy of movies for the representation of conversation and confirm their potential for studying those features of spoken language which many authoritative linguists describe as being neglected by the syllabus.