Abstract
Screenplays present two channels of information in two different types of text—dialogue and scene text. But what are the linguistic specificities of these text types? Taking Claudia Sternberg’s qualitative study of screenplays as its starting point, this chapter quantifies the linguistic texture of screenplays, using Citizen Kane (Mankiewicz and Welles 1941) as a case study. This study automates the quantification process using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software developed by James Pennebaker. Drawing upon Pennebaker’s distinction between verb-pronoun clusters and noun clusters, this chapter compares the relative frequencies of these features in dialogue and scene text to identify the linguistic choices that constitute these two different text types. The chapter ends with a qualitative interpretation of the quantitative data, through an analysis of the way the screenplay’s spatial vocabulary creates a coherent storyworld.
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Notes
- 1.
LIWC is available at http://liwc.wpengine.com/.
- 2.
See, for example, the British National Corpus online: http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/.
- 3.
Plotting ratios as histograms using a linear number scale creates problems because ratios below 1 appear asymmetrical. For example, the ratio for space is 0.4, for there are 2.5 times more spatial words in the scene text than in dialogue. But 0.4 is represented as a small magnitude on a linear number scale. To represent the magnitudes of the ratios below 1 correctly, the ratio values need to undergo log transformation—that is, must be converted to logarithms (and the baseline set at 1, which means ratio values below 1 appear underneath the baseline).
- 4.
Story time and location are also stated in a screenplay’s Scene Headings, which indicate whether the scene is an interior (INT.) or exterior (EXT.), and whether it takes place during the DAY or NIGHT. For example, the first scene heading in the Citizen Kane screenplay spells out the location, time of day, and the year: “EXT. XANADU – FAINT DAWN – 1940” (in Kael, Mankiewicz, and Welles 1971, 91).
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Buckland, W. (2023). The Motion Picture Screenplay as Data: Quantifying the Stylistic Differences Between Dialogue and Scene Text. In: Davies, R., Russo, P., Tieber, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Screenwriting Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20769-3_8
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