NARRATIVES / AESTHETICS / CRITICISM VICTIM-NAMING IN THE MURDER MYSTERY TV SERIES TWIN PEAKS: A CORPUS-STYLISTIC STUDY. CARMEN GREGORI SIGNES Name Carmen Gregori Signes popular and proliferous, but no studies, to date, have Academic centre IULMA. Universitat de València used corpus-stylistics methodologies in the analysis of the E-mail address
[email protected] pivotal character of the victim in the whole narrative. This paper applies said methodology in the hope of shedding KEYWORDS some light on the quantitative and qualitative relationship corpus-stylistics; crime; murder mystery series; Twin Peaks. between the participation roles of the characters, and the frequency and distribution of victim-naming choices in the dialogue of the first two seasons of the acclaimed ABSTRACT TV series Twin Peaks. The analysis proves that textual Corpus linguistics is advancing rapidly in the study of reference to the victim is a central genre-cohesive device a wide variety of genres but is still in its infancy in the which may serve as a waymark to guide the audience study of TV series, a genre consumed daily by millions throughout the many subplots of the series. of viewers. Murder mystery series are one of the most 33 SERIES VOLUME VI, Nº 2, WINTER 2020: 33-46 DOI https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2421-454X/11218 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TV SERIAL NARRATIVES ISSN 2421-454X DIALOGUES WITH TECHNOLOGY NARRATIVES / AESTHETICS / CRITICISM > CARMEN GREGORI SIGNES VICTIM-NAMING IN THE MURDER MYSTERY TV SERIES TWIN PEAKS: A CORPUS-STYLISTIC STUDY. 1. INTRODUCTION The present paper is an attempt to contribute to this line of research by exploring the linguistic choices for ‘victim-nam- For centuries, true and fictional crime have been a matter of ing’ (Tabbert 2015) that characters use to refer to the victim study in a wide array of disciplines both outside and within of murder, Laura Palmer, in a corpus that contains the dia- criminology (e.g., psychology, economics, biology, medicine, logues of the first two seasons of the MMS Twin Peaks.