Is Television Language a Spoken Variety? A Corpus-Based Study of Italian Television

The language of television is generally considered one of many different forms of spoken language; the emphasis is usually laid on the oral nature of communication through television rather than on its technological and thus communicative, textual, and functional specificity as a broadcasting medium, although research on media and communication has shown that the language of broadcasting strongly differs from traditional orality. This paper aims to illustrate the specificity of the language of television with reference to one selected linguistic feature – left and right dislocation -, which is traditionally viewed as typical of spoken language; instances of left and right dislocation in an Italian TV corpus are compared from a linguistic point of view with instances of the same feature in both Italian spoken and written corpora. This study’s assumption – that television broadcast Italian cannot simply be identified with spoken Italian but needs to be distinguished as an independent variety – is confirmed by data on a range of parameters in the use of dislocations that show striking differences between the two varieties; among these parameters, the high frequency of grammaticalizations and of dislocations of clause, the passives/dislocations ratio and the types of dislocated pronouns show that TV broadcast language, much more than canonical speech, tends to use ready linguistic segments of colloquial register (dislocations of clause and grammaticalizations), as well as more rigid forms like passives. The data on passives/dislocations ratio synthesize the mixed and heterogeneous nature of the language of television, which shares important features with both spoken and written languages. The theoretical perspective presented here closely connects language changes in media to technological issues.