Subtitling Television Series. Blanca Arias-Badia

defined it in terms of convention and purpose in ←9 | 10→his Poetics and proposed that each genre has a specific style or mode of expression, that is, epic (narrative), tragic (drama) and lyric (poetry). The term has been widely used in many areas of specialisation, crucially in Linguistics and Literary Theory, though in more recent years has been regarded as too global and fuzzy a concept to be of much use to detailed formal and functional analysis by some practitioners.

      Film and Television Studies being a far younger discipline than Literature Studies, has meant that theorists in the former discipline have drawn on the advances made in the latter in an attempt to account for genres in the televisual field. Feuer (1992) considers television genre a means of classification of plot types, envisaged to reveal similarities and differences among textual types. Her definition closely resembles theoretical proposals from the field of Literature, such as Wellek and Warren’s (1963/1949), Frye’s (2002/1952), Todorov’s (1976) or Ryan’s (1988/1979). Neale and Turner (2001: 1) are clear about the overlap of literary and television studies when it comes to the study of genre, paying special attention to the concept of norm:

      ‘Genre’ is a French word meaning ‘type’ or ‘kind’. As such, it has played an important role in the study of literature, theatre, film, television and other art and media forms. It has long been recognised that output in each of these fields can be grouped into categories, and that each category or class is marked by a particular set of conventions, features and norms.

      As noted by these scholars, ‘[g];enre is the product of a text- and audience-based negotiation activated by the viewer’s expectations’ (ibid.: 7). This idea of genre as key contextual information for audiences is also pointed out by Bednarek (2010: 120), who states that ‘how viewers/practitioners describe/view characters may depend on the genre of the particular fictional television narrative’. It is important to note, however, that viewers’ expectations may not be conscious.

      Once that recognition has been acknowledged as indispensable to identify genres, the question arises as to whether this feature is also fulfilling other functions in the production and reception of TV products. The first function that scholars have deemed central to it is sense attribution (Wolf 1985: 139). The link between recognition and sense attribution ←10 | 11→is also present in McKee (1997: 71), who states that ‘the first step toward a well-told story is to create a small, knowable world’. From the field of TS, Chaume (2003) further highlights the usefulness of genre for sense attribution, considering the identification of the intentionality behind a text as a necessary preliminary task for translation professionals.

      Tous-Rovirosa (2010: 229) attributes a second function to the recognition of television products: it does not only help to understand a text, but is also a source of pleasure for audiences. The notion of enjoyment caused by revisiting a work of art has been pointed out by scholars in other areas, such as Calvino (1995) in his collection of essays for the reading and (re-reading) of classic literary pieces.

      From the point of view of the screenwriter, McKee (1997: 91) assigns a third function to recognition: its creative potential. The author explores the idea of creative limitations and states that in screenwriting,

      genre conventions […] do not inhibit creativity, they inspire it. The challenge is to keep convention but avoid cliché. […] With mastery of the genre we can guide audiences through rich, creative variations on convention to reshape and exceed expectations by giving the audience not only what it had hoped for but, if we’re very good, more than it could have imagined.

      This opinion seems to be shared by other professionals in screenwriting, like Wolff and Cox (1988: 241), who invite trainees to write stories offering something that is just ‘a bit new’, the implication being that it is good (or normal) to stick to genre conventions.

      In addition to these three functions of genre and recognition, which foreground the conceptualisation of genre as a group of texts sharing formal features, there are further conditionings that affect the language used in TV series, mainly imposed by broadcasting companies, as discussed in subsequent chapters. Recent contributions such as Brown’s (2013: 3) point to commercial dominance as one of the main factors dominating what constitutes TV genre:

      [I];t is not altogether clear whether the ‘genre’ should be defined chiefly in formal, commercial or industrial terms. Whilst we should not rule out the possibility of a more traditionally text-based formulation that considers recurring narrative and structural patterns or ideological overtones, such a project would be a major undertaking.

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      With regard to the sharing of formal features, hybridity of genres and programming formats has come to be a common practice in the TV industry today (Allen 1989). The distinction between both concepts, that is, genre and format, is pointedly explained by Neale and Turner (2001: 7) as follows:

      Formats can be original and thus copyright, franchised under licence, and traded as a commercial property. Genres, by definition, are not original. Format is a production category with relatively rigid boundaries that are difficult to transgress without coming up with a new format. […] Genre is the larger, more inclusive category and can be used to describe programmes that use a number of related formats, such as the game show.

      Hybridation of genres in different TV formats has paved the way for scholars to speak of ‘generic marks that guarantee the recognition of the different genres by the spectator in a single TV product’ (Tous-Rovirosa 2010: 59, my translation). Such generic marks include basically specific visual elements or settings as well as thematic recurrence. As a visual topos, Tous-Rovirosa (2013: 21), provides the example of a blackboard in TV series where a talented character, the nerd, displays their ideas for a police team (i.e. for the audience) to better follow them. Chapter 4 reports on other recurrent visual topoi used in the series that make up the corpus under scrutiny.

      The present study raises the question of whether specific lexical or syntactic structures may constitute generic marks (norms?) in audiovisual products. This idea has been previously explored in the case of written specialised texts, where Gläser (1979), Göpferich (1995), and Wilss (1997) have observed recurrent text blocks. Tannen (1982: 51) also speaks of ‘ritual texts’ that display recurrent resources depending on whether it is written or spoken language. Bednarek (2010: 66–67), in turn, argues that there are identifiable feature conventions in TV dialogue, as well as ‘genre-specific vocabulary and discourse’, and goes on to state that:

      [I];t is further likely that different genres of fictional television have linguistic differences, with more witty, fast-paced dialogue in sitcom and other comedy genres, ←12 | 13→and more institutional discourse, technical language, criminal cant, jargon or slang in crime series […], medical dramas […] or sci-fi series.

      The