Acknowledgements

There are many people and institutions that have been instrumental in assisting me with the production of this book. I would like to acknowledge and thank them all most sincerely here. I am grateful to Susan Hunston and Carol Chapelle for commissioning the book for the Cambridge Applied Linguistics series and to the whole Cambridge University Press production team for seeing the manuscript through to publication. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers who provided feedback on earlier draft chapters of the manuscript, and Susan Hunston, who reviewed the final manuscript. Thanks also go to the participants for feedback and suggestions at various research seminars and conferences where parts of the research have been presented over the last few years.

The corpus that I analyse in this book – the Sydney Corpus of Television Dialogue (SydTV) could not have been built without school and faculty funding provided by The University of Sydney. I want to thank the research assistants who helped with building the corpus over several years: Cassandra Liardét (née Fawcett), David Lesslie, Samuel Luke, Ganna Veselovska, and Charlie Revett. I am also grateful to Georgia Carr for assisting with the transcription of interviews and editing the book manuscript. Throughout this project, Mike Scott provided help on WordSmith, implemented features, and fixed bugs – I am incredibly grateful for his support. Thanks are also due to the Sketch Engine team for assistance in exploiting SydTV with Sketch Engine, and to Joel Nothman for advice on Excel. Oral historian Tina Wright provided helpful information on the transcription of the data for the Charlotte project.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under REA grant agreement no. 609305. I wish to express my thanks to the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), University of Freiburg, Germany, for awarding me an FCFP External Senior Fellowship. Much of the groundwork and writing for this book was undertaken in late 2015 and early 2016 during my fellowship. I am immensely grateful for this opportunity and would like to thank Bernd Kortmann and Cristian Mair for fruitful discussions around standardness and corpus linguistics. A big thank you is also due to Roland Muntschick for general research assistance and analysis of questionnaire results.

The remainder of the writing was mostly done during my sabbatical in the first half of 2017 at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I would like to thank the Department of Linguistics for inviting me to come to UCSB as a Visiting Scholar and Mary Bucholtz for being my faculty sponsor, discussing language use in TV series, and commenting on earlier draft sections of this book. I am extremely grateful to John Du Bois for giving me access to the Longman Spoken American Corpus, for information on the corpus contents, and advice on transcription. I would also like to thank Stefan Gries for a helpful conversation about corpus statistics, and the participants at the SocioCult research seminar for their advice on dialogue lines in African American Vernacular English. The University of Sydney provided institutional and financial support during my sabbatical, for which I am very grateful.

I also wish to thank the university lecturers in Germany who helped me with undertaking questionnaires at the Universität Mannheim (Ira Gawlitzek, Rosemarie Tracy); Universität Augsburg (Christian Hoffmann); Universität Heidelberg (Beatrix Busse, Sandra Mollin); Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich (Renate Bauer, Susanne Handl, Jennifer Arendholz); Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg (Christian Mair, Brigitte Halford); Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Universität, Aachen (Stella Neumann); and Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (Brigitta Mittmann, Cordula Glass, Michael Klotz).

I am extremely thankful, too, to the five Hollywood scriptwriters/showrunners whom I interviewed for this book: Jane Espenson, David Mandel, Doris Egan, Bob Berens, and one writer who preferred to remain unidentified. Special thanks are due to Jane Espenson, who was so generous with her time and assistance. I also appreciate the help from Javier Barrios and Hilary Swett regarding access to official final scripts archived in the Writers Guild foundation’s Shavelson-Webb library in Los Angeles. Copyright for all material analysed in this book remains with the original authors/creators and is used exclusively for criticism and scholarship.

Most of all I want to thank Helen Caple, who acted as a sounding board for ideas, read draft chapters as well as the final manuscript, and always gave me valuable feedback. She also had to endure countless hours of television watching, and the fact that I could never turn off my analytical media brain. Without her love and support in all ways, writing this book would have been so much more difficult!