This book explores the linguistic nature of American movie conversation pointing out its
resemblances to face-to-face conversation. The reason for such an investigation lies in the
fact that movie language is traditionally considered to be non-representative of spontaneous
language. The book presents a corpus-driven study of the similarities between face-to-face and
movie conversation using detailed consideration of individual lexical phrases and linguistic
features as well as Biber's Multi-Dimensional Analysis (1998). The data from an existing spoken
American English corpus - the Longman Spoken American Corpus - is compared to the American
Movie Corpus a corpus of American movie conversation purposely built for the research. On the
basis of evidence from these corpora the book shows that contemporary movie conversation does
not differ significantly from face-to-face conversation and can therefore be legitimately used
to study and teach natural spoken language.
