INFORMAL LANGUAGE

Even though the conversation in TV shows is scripted language, previous research has found that this data actually agrees better with native speaker intuitions about language than transcripts of everyday conversation (more information).

To give just a few examples from the TV Corpus, there are many informal phrases, words, and syntactic features that are much more common in this corpus of TV shows than in the spoken portion of the BNC. In addition, there is more than 30 times as much data in the TV corpus than in the spoken portion of the BNC.

And because the language in the TV scripts is so informal, this corpus can also be used to look at differences between dialects (e.g. spoken American and British English) or over time (e.g. 1950s-1970s vs 1990s-2010s).