One might be suspicious of dialogue from TV shows. After all, it is written by a scriptwriter. How well does it really represent authentic, "spoken" language? Let's take a look at this is some detail. In each case, we'll compare the TV scripts with the spoken portion of the BNC. We'll see that in most cases, the language in the TV shows is actually much more informal than the BNC.

The following table shows the raw frequency (3rd and 4th columns) and the frequency per million (PM) words. The rightmost column shows how much more frequent the word is in the TV Corpus than in the BNC-Spoken (e.g. 12.4 = more than twelve times as frequent, per million words). You can click on any of the entries to see the actual examples from the two corpora. For the BNC, look at the SPOKEN column of the chart. For the TV shows, look at the ALL column at the left.

Query	Example	TV	BNC-Spok	TV-PM	BNC-S-PM	TV/BNC-S
. you _vv* me ?	. You heard me? (=subject ellipsis)	3,491	0	10.7	0.0	107.4
, ok\|okay ?	we're leaving now, OK?	100,866	344	310.4	34.8	8.9
, right ?	you're pretty tired, right?	111,195	274	342.1	27.7	12.4
BE so not ADJ	That is so not possible.	633	0	1.9	0.0	19.5
I told you	I told you to get out of here	45,899	385	141.2	38.7	3.6
DO n't get it	I don't get it -- why do you hate me so much?	9,188	89	28.3	9.0	3.1
how can you	How can you even say that?	10,155	193	31.2	19.5	1.6
I totally	I totally get it now!	3,937	20	12.1	3.7	3.3
SCREW PRON	I'm not gonna screw it up this time.	7,386	48	22.7	4.5	5.1
my God	My God -- she's horrible!	102,515	572	315.4	20.0	15.8
. it 's ADJ .	. It's sad. She's totally forgotten him. (=short phrases)	56,198	126	172.9	34.3	5.0
Situational (shows that the TV scripts are very oriented to the "here and now")
hand me * NOUN	Hand me a towel.	1,641	2	5.0	0.2	25.2
. Get out	. Get out before I call the police!	11,263	23	34.7	2.7	12.8
do n't leave	Don't leave! I need you!	4,890	39	15.0	0.7	21.5