VOX POPULAR

This study of language-use is welcome as a contribution to our understanding of how the registers and dialects of English are used by writers of film and television scripts. The word 'media' in the subtitle is misleading as there is no consideration of radio, social media or print. The other limitation of the book is that nearly all the examples given are taken from American television series and films. It has to be said, of course, that we do watch a lot of those in Britain and, indeed, around the world.

In a sense these restrictions may not be as bad as they sound. Robin Queen's limitations at least enable the book to maintain a sharp focus. You want to know how to analyse the script of Mad Men, Modern Family or The Sopranos? To see what is happening in the language of those highly verbal structures? Here's your chance. And if it seems unlikely that you would give such matters high priority you have to recall the modern consensus that language is what we are made of and that mere dictionary definitions are only the beginning of understanding it. Registers, dialects, tones, echoes, contrasts and other elements of language variation indicate or even dictate what we mean just as much as the simple propositional content of our talk and writing. To take one of Queen's favourite examples, we learn at least as much from the fact that a character says 'bein'' and 'lovin'' (rather than 'being' and 'loving)' as we do from the semantic 'content' of those words.

This is a text-book. Clearly aimed at students of Film and Media and of what is known as Communications, Vox Popular fulfils a pedagogic function. The book isn't the result of, nor even a contribution to, academic research or the forwarding of the boundaries of these disciplines. Instead it lets us have a mild and refreshingly uncontentious overview of the sorts of things that students of the media can, perhaps should, now say about their subject.

Thus we learn some things we already knew pretty well: 'language is the mechanism by which you gain access to my thoughts and by which I make my thought… available to you' for instance, a definition included presumably on the grounds that the student body is innocent of these insights. But we also see at work an interesting analysis of some ordinary pieces of discourse (very ordinary, some of it, including excerpts from Friends for Heaven's sake) which shows how the effects of such scripted language work. And then we have it explained to us, and this is indeed sometimes as 'Surprising' as the subtitle of the book claims, how such effects have their origins and explanations in the technology of the modern media as well as in the sociology of the society that consumes them.

Though not an undergraduate I think I learned something from Robin Queen. If you need to understand how films and television series are written and how they convey their meanings she will tell you how. ('She?' A surprise there? Yes, 'Robin' is a woman. The 'ungrammatical' use of a male first name is to be seen in the context of the Feminism that has been present in Western culture since about 1970. Just the sort of point Queen makes here.) And it comes as a slight shock to realise that we had all been rather innocent before Conversational Analysis and Discourse Analysis showed us what was what when we communicate with each other in 'real life'. Did you notice that in older films people tend to speak in proper grammatical sentences? Or that all the characters tended to speak the same kind of English? Whereas now, since the 'linguistic turn' in our reading of the world, they are more likely to speak very differently from one another and, of course, to speak much more realistically? There are broader lessons to learn here alongside the exegesis of register in Sherlock.

So this is an informative study and it sheds light on what we do with language variation and what it does to us. I would hope, though, that any reader would go on from these pleasant analyses of light entertainment to consider the part played by language variation in all our interactions. Furthermore this book leaves me crying out for some deeper attention to be paid to the strong linguistic theories that have come into the field over the last century. Queen, with her American bias, has very little to say about the master of language variation, the great Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) who invented modern discourse analysis, nor much about the founder of Structural Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, who lies behind so much of the linguistic turn. She also ignores Barthes, Foucault, Derrida and the others who, among other credentials, were great philosophers of language. Without them Queen and her discipline would hardly exist.

Still, it is useful and instructive to see a language analyst at work and I will watch the next episode of The Sopranos with my ears more sharply tuned.