VYTAUTO DIDŽIOJO UNIVERSITETAS

HUMANITARINIŲ MOKSLŲ FAKULTETAS UŽSIENIO KALBŲ, LITERATŪROS IR VERTIMO STUDIJŲ KATEDRA

Xiao Liang

ŠNEKAMOSIOS KALBOS YPATUMAI MUILO OPEROSE: TEKSTYNAIS

PAREMTAS TYRIMAS

Bakalauro baigiamasis darbas

Anglų filologijos studijų programa, valstybinis kodas 612Q30004 Anglų filologijos studijų kryptis

Vadovė prof. dr. Jūratė Ruzaitė ______(parašas) (data)

Apginta doc. dr. Rūta Eidukevičienė ______(parašas) (data)

Kaunas, 2020 INFORMAL LANGUAGE USE IN SOAP OPERAS: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY

By Xiao Liang

Department of Foreign Language, Literary and Translation Studies Vytautas Magnus University Bachelor of Arts Thesis

Supervisor: Prof. dr. Jūratė Ruzaitė 3 June 2020 TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures...... I

List of Abbreviations...... I

SANTRAUKA...... II

SUMMARY...... III

1. INTRODUCTION...... 1 1.1 Aim and scope...... 1 1.2 Data and method...... 2 1.3 Structure of the thesis...... 3 2. THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO LINGUISTIC FEATURES IN SOAP OPERAS...... 4 2.1 The history of soap operas...... 4 2.2 Informal language in soap operas...... 6 2.3 An introduction to corpus linguistic studies...... 8 2.4 Language and gender in soap operas...... 9 3. ANALYSIS OF INFORMAL LANGUAGE IN SOAP OPERAS...... 11 3.1 Corpus-based analysis on the use of informal language...... 12 3.2The frequency of expletives in ten different soap operas...... 17 3.3 Collocational patterns of informal language items...... 21 CONCLUSION...... 26 REFERENCES...... 27 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 The frequency of five expletives in soap operas...... 12

Figure 2 The frequency of five expletives used in other genres...... 13

Figure 3 The frequency of four vocatives...... 16

Figure 4 The frequency of damn in ten different soap operas...... 18

Figure 5 The frequency of bitch in ten different soap operas...... 19

Figure 6 The frequency of bastard in ten different soap operas...... 20

Figure 7 The frequency of butt in ten different soap operas...... 20

Figure 8 The frequency of ass in ten different soap operas...... 21

Figure 9 The collocations of the word damn...... 22

Figure 10 The collocations of the word bitch...... 23

Figure 11 The collocations of the word bastard...... 24 Figure 12 The collocations of the word butt...... 24 Figure 13 The collocations of the word ass...... 25

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

1. COCA: Corpus of Contemporary American English 2. DAYS: 3. ATWT: 4. B&B: The bold and the beautiful 5. AMC: 6. GH: 7. GL: 8. OLTL: 9. PASS: 10. PC: Port Charles 11. Y&R: Young and Restless

I SANTRAUKA

Muilo opera kilo Vakaruose ir tuo metu tai buvo palyginti nauja serialų forma. Muilo opera – tai radijo ar televizijos serialas, nagrinėjantis buitines situacijas, kuriam dažnai būdingi melodramos bruožai ir sentimentalumas. JAV ji vadinama „muilo opera“, nes terminas „muilo opera“ kilo iš radijo dramų, kurias rėmė muilo gamintojai. Skirtingos socialinės grupės ir skirtingos žmonių klasės sudaro skirtingas kalbų bendruomenes. Tai įkūnija kalbų įvairovę. Kalba gali būti naudojama išreikšti kalbėtojo požiūriui, kartais taip pat naudojama konstatuoti faktus ir informuoi, kas gali daryti įtaką pasaulio suvokimui. Todėl svarbu tirti muilo operas iš kalbotyros perspektyvos.

Pirmąją darbo dalį sudaro trys skyriai. Iš pradžių šiame darbe pristatoma bendra tyrimo kryptis ir metodai. Antroji dalis yra teorinė apžvalga, kurioje supažindinama su muilo operos istorija ir raida, neoficialia muilo operose vartojama kalba ir tekstynų pritaikymo galimybėmis kalbos tyrimuose. Kalbinė analizė atlikta naudojant Amerikos šiuolaikinės anglų kalbos tekstyną bei Amerikos muilo operų tekstyną, tad darbas yra palyginamasis: čia lyginami bendrojoje amerikiečių anglų kalboje ir muilo operose vartojama neformali leksika. Be to, šiame darbe taip pat lyginamos ir analizuojamos pasirinktų žodžių kolokacij.

II SUMMARY

The originated in the Western and it was a relatively novel serial at that time. A soap opera is a radio or television serial dealing especially with domestic situations and frequently characterized by melodrama and sentimentality. It is called a soap opera in the United States, because the term soap opera originated from radio dramas being sponsored by soap manufacturers. Different social groups and different classes of people form different language communities. This fully embodies the diversity of language. Language can be used to express the speaker's point of view, sometimes also used to state facts, and plays an informative role in reasoning. Therefore, it is necessary to study the linguistics of soap operas.

The first part is divided into three chapters. At first, this paper introduces the overall direction and tools. The second part is the theoretical part, which first introduces the history and development of soap opera, then it introduces the informal language of soap opera, and the role of corpus based language research. It also discusses the data by using the Corpus of American Contemporary English and the Corpus of American Soap Operas, and then collates and analyzes the informal words frequently used in the soap opera by comparing the data. In addition, this paper also compares and arranges the collocations of individual words.

III 1. INTRODUCTION

In the mid-1950s, soap operas played a leading role in early morning and afternoon TV programs. In the past 10 years, soap operas also played a certain role in radio programs. From the 1930s to the 1950s, American classic soap operas were usually a continuing drama about middle-class families living in small towns. The themes of soap operas are mostly related to life and love. For some viewers, the soap operas are a form of background noise in a life otherwise detached from the concerns of the soap opera plot; for others–particularly those who are moved enough by the storyline to want to write about it on-line (or, in my case, in this thesis)–the soap operas are more present, more vividly a part of daily consciousness (Warhol 1998: 26).

The current thesis aims to research linguistic features of soap operas, since the language in soap operas is closest to real life. Paulo Quaglio (2009) also developed a strong interest in the language of soap operas and comedies. He conducted a detailed study and analysis of the language in American sitcom Friends and compared the language of sitcoms with natural dialogue. He explained why he chose Friends as the research object, as he states, “a show about people who just sit around and talk-makes this sitcom an interesting object of study for linguistic analysis, both as a comparison to natural conversation and as an object of study in itself” (Quaglio 2009: 13). It can be seen that the language in soap operas also has important research value.

1.1 Aim and scope

The purpose of this study is to analyze the linguistic features in soap opera. The purpose of this paper is to understand how informal language is used in soap operas by studying the informal language and analyzing the use of some items of informal language. This series of research is based on the Corpus of American Soap Operas (SOAP corpus). The first objective is to identify the differences between informal language in soap operas and informal language in general English. The second objective is to study which informal words are most frequently used in soap operas. The third objective is to study the collocations of informal words.

1 Firstly, this paper will compare the usage of informal language in soap operas and informal language in general. This paper will further elaborate on the usage of informal language in soap operas. Secondly, in this study, the paper will also analyze the frequency of different informal words in soap operas in general, so as to further analyze the features of language in different soap operas. In addition, it also analyzes the differences between language speakers of different genders.

Because the corpus of American soap operas only includes ten soap operas, the main research scope of this paper is also these ten soap operas. The scope of this research is restricted by narrowing it down to the linguistic features of ten soap operas. The ten soap operas will be introduced in chapter three. Corpus is the main tool used in this study, so COCA and SOAP corpus are the main data repositories.

In this study, the following research questions are addressed:

1) What is the frequency of informal words in soap operas?

2) What is the frequency of different categories of informal language in soap operas?

3) How are informal language items used? In which soap operas do they dominate or are used least frequently?

4) How are informal language categories distributed among male and female characters in soap operas?

1.2 Data and Methods

In this thesis, in order to analyze linguistic features accurately, two large corpora will be used to collect, compare and analyze the data. The study is based on the Corpus of American Soap (SOAP corpus) and COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English). There is a very detailed introduction to this corpus on the website, “Corpus of American Soap is researched by Mark Davies, the corpus contains 100 million words in more than 22,000 transcripts of ten American soap operas from 2001 to 2012. It provides very useful insight into informal, colloquial American speech” (Corpus of American Soaps (TV), 2020). The information about COCA is as follows, “the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is the only large, genre-balanced corpus of American English. COCA is probably the most widely-used corpus of English. The corpus contains more than one billion words of text (25+ million words each year 1990-2019) from eight genres: spoken,

2 fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, academic texts, and (with the update in March 2020): TV and Movies subtitles, blogs, and other web pages” (Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), 2020).

These databases are used to compare the usage of informal language in different genres. In addition, there are ten soap operas in the Corpus of American Soap, which are also the main analysis objectives in the analysis of this thesis, which will be introduced in the third chapter.

This paper will take a corpus-based approach to compare the informal language of soap operas to natural conversation. It will analyze the similarities and differences between the two corpora based on the data of overall frequency counts. These frequency also based on Corpus of Contemporary American English and Corpus of American Soaps.

In this paper, this research will use graphic method to explore words that are used more frequently in soap operas. The figures will be shown in chapter 3. This paper not only studies the frequency of informal language in soap operas and other fields, but also analyzes the use of informal language in soap operas in detail and explores the factors that affect the frequency of informal language. Finally, to compare and analyze the differences and similarities between the informal language in soap opera and that in other situations from a macroscopic view.

1.3 Structure of thesis

This paper is divided into three chapters: introduction, theoretical part, and analytical part. The introduction briefly describes the main terms used in this paper and introduces the aim of this paper. In the theoretical part, the history of soap operas is introduced. Informal language used in soap operas and the introduction to corpus linguistic studies are more widely explained. In the analytical part, the words of informal language and the frequency and collocation of these words will be discussed. In addition, the tools used to analyze the data will be described in detail. The conclusion aims to summarize the results and discuss the linguistic features behind the data, and concludes the analysis and discusses the research findings.

3 2. Linguistic features of soap operas

This chapter briefly introduces previous research on soap operas and provides the background of soap operas (Section 2.1). Section 2.2 describes the main categories of informal language and its use. Finally, corpus applications in linguistic studies will be described in Section 2.3.

2.1 The history of Soap Operas

If people want to research soap operas, the first step is to find out the history and definition of soap opera. To explain the source of soap operas, Robert C. Allen claims“, soap opera probably originated in the entertainment press of the late 1930s. The term came from its connection to soap manufacturers although there were also other sponsors and adverts including toothpaste, cereals, drugs, food and beverage” (Allen 1985: 8). Soap operas did not have huge influence at the first appearance, but only slowly developed to be able to sweep the world. With the continuous development of soap operas, watching TV has become one of the basic needs of contemporary people's daily life. Robert C. Allen also mentions this point in his book, as he claims, “Television serials together constitute one of the most popular and resilient forms of storytelling ever devised” (Allen 2001: 13). Because of this, soap operas have become a hot topic. In his book It's Time for My Story: Soap Opera Sources, Structure, and Response, Carol Traynor William (1992) mentions the statistics of watching soap operas, “since many people watch more than one soap, the audience is not simply 6.7 million” (William 1992: 47). This data can show that soap opera was extremely popular at that time, and it even became the mainstream of entertainment at that time, which was inseparable from its form and content. For soap opera audiences, except for women, a large proportion of them are children, Alexander and others proved this through investigation, they investigate the history of college students watching soap operas, it will probably go back to the students’ childhood. Cantor and Pingree also commented on the audience of soap opera, “by junior high and high school, many teenagers are occasional, even regular, soap opera viewers” (Cantor & Pingree 1983: 154).

4 Soap operas were not only popular but also criticized. Charlotte Brunsdon explains criticism, “the critic perceive the soap opera fan as acting without desire, these were the ones with the worst symptoms of withdrawal pains” (Brunsdon 1997: 23). In terms of criticism, Harrington and Bielby also denied the status of soap operas saying: “Soaps are the absolute bottom of the television hierarchy, lumped with game shows and professional wrestling in terms of their perceived moral worth” (Harrington & Bielby 2008: 158). They reckon that housewives were addicted to soap operas. Charlotte brunsdon thinks that these non-nutritious soap operas would erode their spiritual world like drugs, and that women's spiritual level would be lowered, “for them this four times a week shot of soap opera had become as habit forming as a drug” (Brunsdon 1997: 23). Nowadays, more and more academic literature is devoted to the research of soap operas, which is not only because soap operas come from life and reflect some real details in life, but also because soap operas expose many controversial topics, any of which can yield interesting findings. Family is the core of soap opera, so many scholars take this topic as the main starting point to discuss soap opera. Suzanne Frentz states, “one reason we may be staying tuned is because as audience we are either fantasizing or reminiscing about being part of one big happy family”(Frentz 1992: 175). Graeme, Burton also agree with this view, as Burton states, “Female viewers may identity in some respects with the realism of the experience of characters on screen” (Burton, 2005: 199). The excessive attraction of soap opera to women will also bring a series of problems. As Charlotte Brunsdon have criticized,“it is issues not only of class but also gender and age status of the audience which may inflect critical judgement” (Brunsdon 1997, 22). Soap operas are different from real life. The plots in soap operas are accumulated by people through their life experiences. Soap operas are different, as Christine Geraghty said when discussing the topic of women and soap operas, “the essence of soaps is the reflection on personal problems, and the emphasis is on talk not action, on slow development rather than the immediate response, on delayed retribution rather than immediate effect ” (Geraghty 1991: 41). Sometimes language has deeper meaning than simple actions. As Jeremy G. Butler commented on the shortcomings of soap operas,“one of the great limitations of close analysis of soap opera is that shows are never repeated and are generally unavailable for further study” (Butler 1986: 55). American soap operas are not only popular domestically, but also exported to European countries in large numbers, and they are popular all over the world. Therefore, these countries have

5 an advantage in studying the language of soap operas. Carol William also said “European, English, and Australian universities study U.S. soap operas, which is fitting because story is at the core of culture and broadcast soap opera is story for the electronic age” (William 1992: 73). Therefore, both language and culture are of great importance, but this paper focuses on the linguistic features of informal language in soap operas. In a word, by showing the real problems of society, soap operas not only provide the audience with recreational entertainment, but also provide the audience with direct information, knowledge education and even psychological balance. Facts show that the artistic form and social impact of soap operas occupy an important place on Western TV screens.

2.2 Informal Language in Soap Operas

There is much more conversation than action in the soap opera genre. As Jeremy G. Butler claimed, “specific stylistic patterns characterize the genre’s use of dialogue, music, and sound effects, of these three, dialogue has proven to be the dominant concern for those who have written on the genre” (Butler 2010: 54). Therefore, the research status of language in soap opera is even higher than that of plot. Language is not simply arranged by words, but also contains profound meanings. No living language is simply one set of words which can be used the same way in all situations. The nature of language is such that there is an infinite variety of different ways to arrange its elements. The same words will have different effects in different situations, so language is the carrier of the plot, through which we can present wonderful and changeable stories. As Mary Brown explains, “emphasis of soap opera is on problem solving, and intimate conversation in which dialogue carries the weight of the plot. And plots that hinge on relationships between people, particularly family and romantic relationships” (Brown 1994: 26). Thus, there are many ways to say the same thing, depending on where you are, who you are talking to, and how you feel. With everyday lives and conversation comes informal language. Mark Davies made a previous attempt to measure the extent of informal language in these series. Thus, he published a study of his own corpus and his results show that “soap operas represent everyday speech and informal language to a high extent” (Davies 2012: 1). The informal language in soap operas is also very special. Crystal divides it into two categories, as he said, ‘informal language has two characteristics in use, spontaneous speech in situations that may be described as natural or

6 "real-life," and the use of a "low” dialect or language in preference to a “high” one’ (Crystal 1985: 125).

Formal and informal language serve different purposes. The tone, the choice of words and the way the words are put together vary between the two styles. Formal language is less personal than informal language. It is used when writing for professional or academic purposes like university assignments. Formal language does not use colloquialisms, contractions or first-person pronouns such as ‘I’ or ‘we’. Most uses of English are neutral, they are neither formal nor informal.

Soap operas come from life, so informal language in soap operas also comes from life. The informal language in life is different from the language in soap operas. Davies carried out a comparative study where he used the Corpus of American Soap Operas in comparison to the spoken parts of COCA and the BNC. As he concludes, “many informal phrases and constructions in the Corpus of American Soap Operas are (much) more common than in the spoken portions of COCA and the BNC” (Davies 2012: 67).

In his study, he investigated expressions such as: “you crazy?”, “you heard me?” and “don’t get it”. He found that these informal language items were used much more often in the SOAP corpus in comparison to the BNC and COCA (Davies 2012: 56). Some words are at least three times as frequent (per million words) in the soap opera corpus as they are in the spoken part of either the BNC or COCA […] the soap opera corpus has a lot more words dealing with everyday life and personal relationships than the more formal spoken in COCA and the BNC (Davies 2012: 135).

He gets the data by inputting these informal words into BNC and COCA and compares them with the frequency of using these informal words in life, and then draws a conclusion. The data proved his point to be right, and he could state with certainty whether informal language is more common in soaps than in real life, for instance. Thus, Mark Davies’s research shows that informal language is used more frequently in soap operas than in daily life.

Although soap operas can reflect the real society, soap operas are different from life, which makes people begin to doubt the authenticity of the language in soap operas. Graeme Burton also notes that the dialogues we see in soap operas are not all real, as Burton states, “events and even conversations may be referred to and not actually shown” ( Burton 2005: 56). 7 The same question is raised by Palma Fahey (2005), who claims that since the language is not spontaneous in the dialogues in these series, it can be argued that the conversations cannot fully represent spoken language. Chinese students usually choose to watch soap operas when they study English. This strategy can really improve their confidence in communicating with others, but sometimes it also makes native English speakers think that they are strange. Thus, conversation is an important part, but as Quaglio observes, “despite the great deal of research interest in conversation, not much emphasis has been placed on large-scale grammatical descriptions of conversation in soap operas” (Quaglio 2009: 5). The reason may be that the dialogue in soap operas is not exactly the same as that in life. For example, the dialogue in soap operas may be more exaggerated than that in life.

Because of the emergence of opposing views, it has aroused people's research and discussion on this view. Since some people think that the language in soap operas is untrue, so this also makes the opposite view appear. Some people think that the language in soap operas can reflect the real life. Soap opera is real enough for the audience, and many soap operas try to restore the real-life scene and reproduce daily life, so the language used on TV programs is similar to the language used in reality.

Many people think that the language in soap operas is close to the dialogue in life because the dialogue seems very natural and the audience get a sense when watching the soap operas that these characters are all very close to each other. Lambertz & Hebrok describe this topic as “Definitely yes because each word that comes out of their mouths is like any other thing someone would say (mainly cause it is a soap opera)”(Lambertz & Hebrok 2011: 44).

For the authenticity of language in soap operas, most people still think it is real. Therefore, many people, including some researchers and ordinary people share the common view that the language in soap operas is close to the language in real life. Maybe in some aspects it is distant from the real state of the dialogue in life, but in most cases it is very close to the language of everyday life.

2.3 An introduction to corpus linguistic studies

8 In the process of researching the linguistic features of soap operas, corpus data plays an important role. This thesis can be considered a corpus-based comparative study based on both quantitative and qualitative analysis.

The definition of a corpus as a collection of texts in an electronic data-base can beg many questions for there are many different kinds of corpora. “Corpus-based research is often assumed to have begun in the early 1960s with the availability of electronic, machine-readable corpora” (Kennedy 1998: 13).

The language in soap operas is spontaneous dialogue, and it is close to life. Therefore, vocabulary is the focus of this paper. For vocabulary, corpora will provide a lot of data for comparative analysis. The use of corpus will provide many benefits to the study of vocabulary. In addition, Graeme Kennedy summarized the role of corpus in research on vocabulary, which he expressed as follows, “the availability of computerized corpora from the mid-1960s made possible a new generation of statistically based descriptions of the lexicon, and in fact changed the nature of lexical studies by making possible rapid and comprehensive analysis of huge amounts of data with complete accountability” (Graeme Kennedy 1998: 97).

The collocations of informal language in soap operas is also part of the research content in this paper. In soap operas with different themes, the collocation of informal words is also different. It is very meaningful to study the different collocation of informal words in different soap operas based on the use of corpus. Graeme Burton also believes that the study of collocation is meaningful. A number of scholars have explored, “the phenomenon and have considered the significance for linguistic theory of the fact that some words can have a tendency to occur in the company of other words in certain contexts, e.g. pouring rain, statistically significant, strong tendency” (Graeme Burton 2005: 108).

2.4 Language and Gender in Soap operas

Informal language appears very frequently in soap operas, which has aroused the research interest of many scholars, and they have compared the features of expression between men and women. They are curious about the reason why men and women interact differently in soap operas. Previous

9 research results offer some potential explanations to these differences.

In the use of informal language, different genders use informal language with different frequency. As Janet Holmes states, “women and men may be operating with different rules of interaction, it seems possible that they often percieve the functions of talk in specific contexts rather differently” (Holmes 1995: 68). This is related to different gender and age groups. As John B. Whitelaw pointed out, “children who are experiencing adolescence use informal language more frequently than other age groups, and boys use informal language more frequently than girls in adolescence” (Whitelaw 1959: 19).

For this difference, as Janet Holmes concludes, “women are more concerned with making connections; they seek involvement and focus on the interdependencies between people. Men are more concerned with autonomy and relationships” (Ball 2005: 27). The reason for the difference in language use between men and women, as Ball states, “the explaination attributes gender-based differences in linguistic behavior to the differential distribution of power and society” (Ball 2005: 28).

Many scholars have expressed their opinions and explained the reasons. For example, Martin Ball claims, “a choice to use vernacular forms may be affected by numerous variable such as group identity, class, age, culture, and even affective mood” (Ball 2005: 28). The potential ambiguity of linguistic strategies to mark both power and solidarity in face-to-face interaction has made mischief in language and gender research. Tannen also points out the reasons why different genders speak differently, which is also related to the characteristics and status of different genders. As Tannen states, “wherein it is tempting to assume that whatever women do results from, or creates, their powerlessness and whatever men do results from, or creates, their dominance” (Tannen 1993: 173). It can be seen that different gender can also affect the language of speech. People of different class in soap operas may use different ways of speaking.

In a word, the language of soap opera is closely related to many aspects. Soap opera also can reflect the society and culture at that time. The focus of this paper is to analyze the language features of soap operas, so the next chapter will focus on data analysis.

10 3. Analysis of informal language in soap operas

Informal words and phrases appear not only in soap operas, but also in other genres such as novels and spoken English. The author Paulo Quaglio (2009) studies informal language in daily conversation. In his book Television dialogue: the sitcom Friends vs. natural conversation, Paulo Quaglio mainly chooses Friends as the research object, and makes a detailed analysis of informal language use in this series. This chapter aims to list the frequency of informal words used in soap operas by using COCA and the Corpus of American Soap Operas, then compare these informal words to different contexts. The frequency of informal words in soap operas is compared here with the use of informal words in other genres, such as TV, fiction, web, magzine, spoken interaction, news, and academic texts. Then I discuss whether there is more informal vocabulary in soap operas than in other genres and explore the reason for the result. There are many types of soap operas, each with a different cultural background and spirit. In this paper, all the data in The corpus of American soap opera are from the following ten soap operas. They are All my children, As the World Turns, The bold and the beautiful, Days of Our Lives, General Hospital, Guiding Light, One Life to Live, Passions, Port Charles, Young and Restless. Since the research in this paper is mainly based on the soap opera corpus, the soap operas analyzed in this paper are limited to these ten. Except for Port Charles, the other nine soap operas are broadcast in multiple seasons, of which the General Hospital has the largest number of seasons and reached 57 seasons. Although Port Charles does not broadcast the seasons, there are a total of 2500 episodes. This makes the soap operas keep pace with the times and it is in line with the current development trend. In the analysis part, this paper will focus on analyzing the frequency of expletives and vocatives in soap operas. For expletives, this part will select five representative words to analyze and compare their frequency in soap operas with that in other genres. About vocatives, this part will also choose four words to analyze how often they are used in ten soap operas. The reason I choose the four words is the research of Paulo Quaglio (Quaglio 2009: 143), who studied these four word in Friends, so it is curious about the frequency of these words in soap operas. Because the Corpus

11 of American Soap Operas provides ten typical soap operas, the following data and analysis will also focus on these ten soap operas. Different discourses can reflect different linguistic features. Different utterances can reflect different linguistic characteristics. For example, there are many different kinds of informal language in All my children, such as “shit” and “hey”, both of which are commonly used in oral and daily conversations and cannot be used in formal situations, but there is also a difference between these two words.

3.1 Corpus-based analysis on the use of informal language

This paper mainly studies the expletives and vocatives which have obvious different frequency and usage characteristics in informal language. These words are chosen for analysis because they are very representative and they are an important part of informal language. In addition, Paulo Quaglio (2009) has also studied the role of these words in comedy Friends, so the features of these words in soap operas are also very interesting and attract people to study them. Expletives are profane or obscene expressions usually of surprise or anger. Expletives that appear more frequently than other words in soap operas are damn, bitch, bastard, butt and ass. They are mostly taboo words related to parts of the body, gender. Among the ten soap operas studied, damn appeared the most frequently (28583 tokens). The use of the bitch is second only to damn (5658 tokens). The frequency of damn is five times that of bitch. The frequency of using bastard and butt is similar, they are 3867 and 3423 tokens. The least frequently used word is ass (2335 tokens).

12 Figure 1. The frequency of five expletives in soap operas.

According to Figure 1, among these expletives, damn appears most frequently. Bitch is not used as frequently as damn. The frequency of bastard is 3867 and butt is similar as bastard, the frequency is 3423. It is found in the data survey that the less frequently used is ass (2335 occurrences). Followed by the word bitch, the word is often used in soap operas to curse hate. The word ass is often used in exclamatory sentences, which is similar to the meaning of stupidity. (1) Don't be such an ass. In this example, ass is not simply referring to body parts. As mentioned above, ass is used here as a taboo or expletive to emphasize the strong emotional expression of the person. It has been found that these words can be related to emotion. (2) Adam: I was trying to protect him from me, damn it. In example (2), the phrase damn it can both express informal context and the casualness of spoken language, and it also can make the audience feel their anger. At the same time, the character’s emotions are also released. The data of Figure 1 is limited to the frequency of use in soap operas. In order to compare the use of these words in different situations, this paper will use COCA to collect some other data for comparative analysis. These words can also appear in other fields, such as novels, magazines, movies, etc. Figure 2 provides the frequency of these words used in other genres and the frequency is normalised.

13 Figure 2. The frequency of five expletives used in other genres. Based on this figure, the frequency of these five words is the most prominent in the genre of television program, such as the word damn (38079 occurrences), which has the highest frequency in TV programs. Although the frequency is not particularly high in the genre of fiction and web, it is in sharp contrast with the data in the remaining genres, especially in the academic field. The frequency of these five words in academic texts is very similar. According to the results above, the total number of frequencies in the television programs is 101499, the frequency of the five words is higher than other genres. The total frequency of the five words in fiction is 30515. In the website, the total number of frequencies is 12016. The total number of frequencies in magzine is 7054. The total number of frequencies in spoken is 4165. About the news, the total number of frequencies is 2826. The total number of frequencies in academic texts is 1031, the frequency in academic is the least. By calculating the data in Figure 1, the total frequency of these five words in soap opera is 43866. In conclusion, the sum of these words in television programs is greater than the frequency of soap operas. There is logic to that, because there are many kinds of TV programs, such as comedies, talk shows, etc., while soap opera is just one of them. For several other genres, soap operas are more frequent than them. But it is surprising that the frequency of the five expletives in soap operas is higher than that in spoken. The reason for this phenomenon is that the spoken context selected in COCA comes from different radio programs and speech. Compared with radio program, soap opera and TV programs can better reflect the language in daily life. In terms of data analysis, the five expletives are the most frequently used in TV programs, in this genre, the frequency of damn is the highest, and butt is the lowest of the five words. The frequency of these words is very small in academic texts, but there is a reason for this, because the more academic the content, the more formal the language used, so the frequency of informal words will be far lower than other genres. TV programs are also a tool that can best reflect daily conversation, but in addition, the reasons for the high frequency of informal language include that soap opera or other TV programs contain exaggerated parts. In comedy, the protagonists often use exaggerated words and actions to make people laugh. Soap opera is better at using contradictions to attract audiences. The reason why these words are less frequent in fiction than in TV programs is that dialogue is a very important part of fiction. In addition to the description of appearance, the

14 character's image still needs to be described by language, but it is not all characters need to be very formal, and the use of cursing words helps express the character's anger and strong feelings, which can make the character more vivid. (3) Tad: My wife and my kids, and I can't do a damn thing to protect them locked up in here. In example (3), damn can express Tad's anger and self reproach for his inability to protect his wife, which makes his image more distinct. Thus, the use of language is more inclined to a relaxed and cheerful atmosphere. Therefore, the frequency of informal languages in fiction is very high, second only to televison programmes and soap operas. Damn is also used in web very frequently. The frequency is 4622. This is because web as an open platform is less restrictive in publishing articles and comments than in novels and televisions. This is a platform that there are not too many restrictions, just as the use of informal languages is also oriented to the public and it can be applied to daily life. It is because of their openness that they encourage the widespread use of informal languages. In addition, web can also be used as a platform for venting personal emotions like blog. Many people get vented by recording their worries in words, so the use of cursing words has gradually become more frequent. Damn is least used in the academic field, which is not an unexpected finding. Academic language is typically associated with formality, and the language requirements are rather rigid. Due to the restrictions imposed by the TV network, fucking is not used at all in soap operas, so there is no information about fucking and shit in the corpus at all. In addition, some people also change the informal language they usually use because of specific and formal situations, for example, when some know that they are receiving very formal interviews to reduce or stop using the informal language, or some teenagers will also reduce to use some expletives, such as bitch in front of their parents. Obviously, this does not apply to all people. Thus, the lower frequency of all of these word forms is to be expected. However, the frequency of fucking in COCA is much higher than the frequency of damn, and it is almost three times the frequency of damn in soap operas. Therefore, it can be guessed that soap operas are trying to replace the more frequent use of fucking and overuse damn.

15 Expletives are a category of informal language used in soap operas to express emotions and increase emotional color. These words can be interpreted as the case used when the referent of the noun is being addressed. In daily life, vocatives are essential, but because different countries have different cultures, vocatives are also used differently. For example, in the Asian region, vocatives are usually employed to show respect and courtesy, but some other countries pay more attention to freedom and democracy and thus they may use more direct, playful, or less respectful vocatives when communicating.

Figure 3. The frequency of four vocatives. The corpus data shows that the vocatives that are used more frequently in soap operas are guys, buddy, dude and bro. According to data provided in SOAP, guys is the most frequently used vocative in soap operas. For the frequency of use of guys, it is 8 times the frequency of use of buddy, which is far more than other vocatives. Dude and bro are used less frequently than guys and buddy, bro is used least frequently, and guys is used 34 times more often than bro. This result shows that the use of bro is not very common.

The word guys is generally used in conversations with three or more interlocutors. Other conversations may only need two people, and guys is generally used for many people. It also often greets everyone or attracts everyone’s attention. The atmosphere of communication is more relaxed and enjoyable than in the case of the aforementioned expletives. Generally speaking, the use of

16 expletives is accompanied by more negative emotions, such as damn it, son of bitch. However, the use of vocatives is not same as expletives. It has no obvious emotional direction. In terms of use, it is more simple than expletives. It just expresses greeting with other people, but hello guys is also different from hello everyone. Compared with everyone, guys is more casual. The use of the word buddy in soap operas also accounts for a large proportion, and its frequency is second only to guys. Buddy is another name for a good friend and dude is an informal form of address for a man. In addition, it is also equivalent to the pronoun used for groups, the use of this word implies a close relationship between the two parties. In a word, the frequency of expletives, vocatives and expletives in TV programs and soap opera is much higher than that in other genres. The frequency of informal language in academic aspect is the least, which is because the academic side is stricter in language requirements. For vocatives in informal language, it is found that the language atmosphere of these words is also relatively easy, which is often used on occasions of greeting.

3.2 The Frequency of expletives in ten different soap operas

The previous chapter discussed the total frequency of each expletives in all soap operas to compare with the frequency of other genres. In this part, the thesis mainly analyzes each soap opera separately to study whether the use of expletives is related to the theme, plot and type of soap operas. So this chapter will focus on analyzing the data of expletives in ten different soap operas. Regarding soap operas, this thesis studied ten representative soap operas to analyze the informal language. These soap operas are All my children, As the World Turns, The bold and the beautiful, Days of Our Lives, General Hospital, Guiding Light, One Life to Live, Passions, Port Charles, Young and Restless. These soap operas also provide sufficient context for this study and makes the results more stable. This chapter mainly studies the frequency of the five expletives mentioned above in the ten soap operas, then collects data through the Corpus of American Soap Operas and finally analyzes the data.

17 Figure 4. The frequency of damn in ten different soap operas. According to Figure 4, the use of the word damn is most widely used in the soap opera Days of Our Lives. According to quantitative data, it has appeared a total of 6,526 times. Compared with other soap operas, the number is far more than other soap operas. The second most frequent soap opera is All my children. A total of 4,124 damn appeared in this soap opera, it is second only to the soap opera Days of Our Lives. The term damn is used the least in Port Charles, the frequency is only 350, the gap between it and Days of Our Lives is very large. Days of Our Lives is a story about contradictions and tragedies between two families. The plot is mostly intense. In this soap opera, in order to be consistent with the plot, the language is more informal than other soap operas. Informal language can also better reflect the emotional fluctuations in this soap opera. For example, there is a love triangle between Williams, Tom and Alice's daughter Addie in this soap opera, and when Addie and Williams quarrel, there is a lot of informal language.

18 Figure 5. The frequency of bitch in ten different soap operas. About the use of the term bitch, Days of Our Lives was the most frequently used soap operas, its frequency has reached 1508. Although bitch and damn are used more frequently in this soap opera than in other soap operas, the frequency of damn is almost four times that of bitch. The frequency of the informal word bitch in One Life to Live is 1109; it is second only to the soap opera Days of our lives. In the soap opera Port Charles, bitch appeared only 47 times. The use of informal language in soap operas is closely related to the subject matter, type and plot of soap operas. For example, the soap opera Port Charles is relatively professional, and many of the languages used are medical-related terms, so the overall language is more formal than other soap operas. On the contrary, Days of our lives are more life, not limited to some work matters. The theme of the whole soap opera is around the communication between people, so language has become the main tool to drive the story, and the characters' career and background are not like Port Charles is so unified, which also leads to the diversity of language. Because the dialogue in this play mostly reflects daily life, the use of informal language is more frequent. As a result, informal language appears infrequently in this soap opera. From the perspective of theme, it is reasonable that the word "bitch" is frequently used in the soap opera Days of our lives, because the theme of Days of our lives is tragicomic relations between families. In addition, the conflict between characters in the plot also increases the frequency of informal language, which is very obvious in this soap opera, such as the rape of Rona, wife of Mickey Horton, by Mickey's brother Bill and the triangle romance between Williams, Tom and Alice's daughter Addie, all of which are contributing to the increase in the frequency of soap operas. 19 Figure 6. The frequency of bastard in ten different soap operas. As shown in the figure above, the data has not changed much compared with the previous results, and the Days of our lives are still the soap opera that use the most informal words, bastard, as explained above. But in this data, soap operas with the least frequent use of informal languages have changed. A survey by the term bazard found As the World Turns to be the least frequently used soap opera. The reason for this result is very similar to why Port Charles became the least used soap opera, because As the World Turns is about the personal and professional lives of doctors and lawyers. Therefore, it seems that less informal language appears in this drama is reasnable.

Figure 7. The frequency of butt in ten different soap operas. According to the data of the informal word "butt" provided by the corpus, the word "butt" appears in all ten soap operas, but the frequency is different. Butt has been used many times in All my children, Young and restless, Days of our lives, but it's used the most in All my children and the 20 least in Port Charles, only 53 times. It appears five times more frequently in All my children than in Port Charles. In addition, the languages in The bold and the beautiful and Passions do not often use informal languages, such as butt.

Figure 8. The frequency of ass in ten different soap operas. General Hospital is a soap opera that uses the words ass most frequently. Ass has appeared 508 times in this soap opera. As mentioned earlier, General Hospital is that language situations are related to medicine, and language use is also very professional. Ass is not all used as an expletive in this soap opera. In some situations, it simply means the most superficial meaning: body part. Ass does not always mean swearing. In addition to the meaning of body parts, it can also be used as slang, sometimes ass doesn't mean body parts or swearing to somebody, and this sentence just means that I have saved you many times. In short, the use of informal language in soap operas is related to the theme and type of soap operas. Soap operas involving academic and professional features tend to be more formal in language use. And informal language often appears in soap operas which are similar to daily life, and it often appears in the situation of plot conflict to express the strong emotions of the protagonist through informal language. In addition, in the informal language, words like "bitch", "damn", "buff"，"bazard", "ass" are representative, but they do not usually appear in the formal conversation, they are very common in oral or daily conversation.

3.3 Collocational patterns of informal language items

21 This chapter mainly analyzes the context of informal words to find out the most frequently used collocations. This part will only select five expletives for research, then analyze and discuss their collocation and the frequency of the collocations.

Figure 9. The collocations of the word damn. The results above shows that the most frequently used word with damn is "thing". In addition, the word "give" is also used with damn a lot. These two words are far more frequent than other collocations, damn used 11 times more frequently with these two words than with other words. Thus, the collocation of damn is relatively fixed. Damn often collocates with thing, give and pretty. And damn thing is a collocation with higher frequency. Compared with other collocations, damn it is a collocation with lower frequency, and damn it is used when swearing at something or someone and often expresses strong emotions. Among the three collocations, damn is used in a pre-modifying position to modify the latter and express the negative meaning.

22 Figure 10. The collocations of the word bitch. According to the above data, the word "bitch" is most often used with "son", and the frequency is 48 times that of "dumb". From this aspect, the frequency difference between the two words is very large. This is very obvious in the figure 10. Except for the word son, the frequency of other words is very similar, and the frequency of use is not very high. （4）Ah, don't be such a little bitch. （5）I've got a lot to say about the feminist approach to fucking being a bitch. Three common collocation expressions are listed above. As shown in the following example, when son and bitch are collocated, they cannot be used directly. （6）He's a tough son of a bitch and an old-school gentleman. The preposition of is needed to connect the two words. This collocation has different meanings from when they are used alone. Usually, a bitch is used for an offensive way of referring to a woman, especially an unpleasant one. Therefore, bitches are often applied to women, while the objects of son of bitch are changed after they are used together, and they are often used for men. Although both of them are informal languages, they are quite different at this point. Five of the eight words with high frequency are adjectives, which account for a large part in the collocation of the word "bitch". These adjectives modify the word "bitch" to achieve different degrees of swearing. Different adjectives also indicate strong emotions.

23 Figure 11. The collocations of the word bastard. The most frequent collocation with bastard is little. In this data, it shows that there is no important difference in the frequency of words used with bastard, and the highest frequency is also lower than the previous expletives. Among these collocations, the lowest frequency is lucky, which only appears 203 times, which is a quarter of the usage frequency of little.

Figure 12. The collocations of the word butt. It can be seen from the above figure 12 that butt is often used with kick. The collocation of butt and off is also very common, which can be said to be the second common collocation of butt, but its frequency is only half of that of kick.

24 The word "kick" usually used as a verb to use with the noun "butt". This collocation does not really mean an action, but a mood of the speaker.

Figure 13. The collocations of the word ass.

The last word chosen for this chapter is ass. From the above data, it can be seen that the frequency of the collocation of kick and ass is amazing. The frequency has reached 5442 times, which is 17 times the frequency of the word "bitch". And 5442 tokens is a relatively high frequency among the five expletives. In addition, ass is often used with some prepositions. Although the frequency of this combination is not as high as that of the words on the figure 13, this collocation is very typical. It can be seen from the above text that ass is often used with these prepositions. For example, ass with out means to make a fool of oneself while under the influence of a substance. Ass is collocated with preposition off, ass off is a rude slang that used to emphasize the preceding verb as having been done to the maximum degree. In a word, it is a very valuable and interesting research to analyze the common collocations of these words in soap operas, because the research results can help you better understand the features of the language in soap operas. Through the above analysis of collocations of these words, we can draw a conclusion that the collocations of these words are emotional, and this emotion is more negative.

25 Conclusion

After analysing the corpus in regards of the informal language in soap operas, the following conclusions were made: informal language is more frequently used in soap operas than in many other genres, such as academic texts and news. In addition, there is an important difference in the frequency of informal language in different soap operas, which may be related to the theme and type of soap operas. Before the analysis, many people think the frequency of informal language in soap operas should be less than that in spoken language, but through data analysis, the frequency of informal language in soap operas is nearly 11 times that in spoken language. The frequency of informal language in soap operas is only lower than that of TV programs. In this paper, the focus of the study is mainly on the two aspects of expletives and vocatives in informal language. The comparison shows that the total frequency of vocatives in soap operas is higher than that of expletives. The reason for this fact is probably that vocatives are more colloquial. In addition, by comparing the frequency of expletives in different soap operas, this paper finds that the theme and type of expletives do affect the frequency of exploits. The frequency of informal language is significantly different between the two soap operas, Days of our lives and Port Charles. This is mainly because the professional background of Port Charles is doctor, so the use of language is more professional. The theme of Days of our lives is about tragedies and comedies between families, so the more close to daily life, the more frequent the informal language of soap opera is. All in all, through the study of different aspects of informal language in soap operas, it is found that informal language is more likely to appear in more life-oriented aspects, whether soap operas or other fields and informal languages are more likely to appear in soap operas with more obvious conflicts.

26 References

Allen, R. C. 1995. To be Continued, Soap Operas Around the World. London: Routledge.

Allen, R. C. 1985. Speaking of soap operas. London, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Carol, Traynor Williams. 1992. It's Time for My Story: Soap Opera Sources, Structure, and Response Hardcover. Praeger Press.

Carveth, Rodney Andrew. 1992. Exploring the Effects of “Love in the Afternoon”: Does Soap Opera Viewing Create Perceptions of a Promiscuous World?. In Suzanne Frentz (ed) Staying Tuned: Contemporary Soap Opera Criticism, Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

Charlotte, Brunsdon. 1997. Screen Tastes: Soap Opera to Satellite Dishes. London:Routledge.

Corpus of American Soap Operas. Available at https://www.english-corpora.org/soap/ Accessed 10 March 2020.

Corpus of Contemporary American English. Available at https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/ Accessed 10 March 2020.

Davies, Mark. 2012. Comparing the Corpus of American Soap Operas, COCA, and the BNC. [Online], Available: https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/compare-bnc.asp Accessed May 16, 2020.

Denise D. Bielby，C. Lee Harrington. 2008. Global TV: Exporting Television and Culture in the World Market. New York University Press.

Frentz, Suzanne. 1992. Staying Tuned: Contemporary Soap Opera Criticism. Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

Geraghty, C. 1991. Women and Soap Opera: A Study of Prime Time Soaps. Polity Press.

27 Graeme, Burton. 2005. Media and Society: Critical Perspectives. Open University Press.

Graeme, Kennedy. 1998. An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics. London: Longman.

Janet, Holme. 1995. Women, Men and Politeness. London and New York: Routledge.

Jeremy G. Butler. 1986. Notes on the Soap Opera Apparatus: Televisual Style and "As the World Turns". Cinema Journal 25: 53-70.

Jeremy G. Butler. 2010. Television style. London:Routledge.

Jeremy G. Butler. 2011. Television: Critical Methods and Applications. London:Routledge.

John B. Whitelaw. 1959. Pamphlet. United States: Government Printing Office.

Kathrin Lambertz, Melanie Hebrok. 2011. Women’s Language in Soap Operas: Comparing Features of Female Speech in Australia and Germany. Griffith Working Papers in Pragmatics and Intercultural Communication 4: 39-54.

Martin, Ball. 2005. Clinical sociolinguistics. UK: Blackwell publisher.

Mary, Ellen Brown. 1994. Soap opera and women's talk: the pleasure of resistance. SAGE Publication.

Muriel B. Cantor, Suzanne Pingree. 1983. The Soap Opera (Commtext Series). SAGE Publication.

Quaglio, P. 2009. Television Dialogue. The Sitcom Friends vs. Natural Conversation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Robyn, Warhol. 1998. Feminine Intensities: Soap Opera Viewing as a Technology of Gender. Available at https://www.colorado.edu/gendersarchive1998-2013/1998/07/25/feminine-intensities-soap-opera-vi ewing-technology-gende Accessed 3 May 2020.

28 Tannen, D. 1993. Gender and Conversational Interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

29 The student’s statement

I, , have read the Department of Foreign Language, Literary and Translation Studies statement on plagiarism. I understand that plagiarism is wrong and that it can take different forms, some direct and some indirect. I also understand that plagiarism in an essay, project or thesis submitted to this department will result in a greatly reduced mark or rejection of the paper entirely.

Student’s signature______Date ______

30