Prof. Dr. Monika Bednarek – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Prof. Dr. Monika Bednarek

The University of Sydney
Corpus Linguistics

External Senior Fellow (Marie S. Curie FCFP)
September 2015 – June 2016

Last Update: 31.08.2016

Curriculum Vitae

Dr Monika Bednarek currently works in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, with previous posts held at the University of Technology, Sydney and the University of Augsburg, Germany, where she completed her PhD in 2005. She first came to Australia in 2006 on a 2-year research fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), and more recently was a Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, and the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford (2013). Much of her research is located at the interface of linguistics and media discourse studies, with special focus on television and news discourse, and she has published widely in these areas. Another research interest lies in the linguistic expression of opinion and emotion, and the combination of corpus methods with discourse analysis. Publications in this area include her 2008 book Emotion Talk across Corpora (Palgrave Macmillan).

Selected Publications

Bednarek, M. (2012) ‘Get us the hell out of here’: Key words and trigrams in fictional television series. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 17/1: 35-63.
Bednarek, M. & H. Caple (2012) News Discourse. London/New York: Continuum.
Bednarek, M. (2010) The Language of Fictional Television: Drama and Identity. London/New York: Continuum.
Bednarek, M. (2008) Emotion Talk across Corpora. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bednarek, M. (2006) Evaluation in Media Discourse. Analysis of a Newspaper Corpus. London/New York: Continuum.

FRIAS Project

A corpus linguistic analysis of linguistic practices and innovation in television dialogue.

US TV series are globally popular products, and billions of viewers world-wide are exposed to the language used in such series. Yet we know surprisingly little about television dialogue as a language variety. This project identifies and explains linguistic practices in US TV dialogue, with a focus on linguistic innovation. The project combines corpus linguistic methods with questionnaires to investigate how such dialogue is consumed by advanced learners of English. It analyses a large corpus of dialogue from over 60 TV series, scriptwriting manuals, and questionnaires distributed to German students. Through its methodological innovation, its empirical basis and interdisciplinary approach the project will make significant contributions to corpus research, debates on American pop culture, mass media communication, and television studies.