Language change and (im)politeness in film discourse

Abstract The paper examines language change based on evidence from the Corpus of Greek Film Dialogue , an extensive corpus of dialogues from 105 Greek films, spanning nine decades (from 1938 to 2018, approx. 900,000 words in total). Keywords are identified for each decade of film dialogues with reference to the corpus as a whole, as well as with reference to conversational and other data from Greek corpora. Language change in the data is found to be crucially related to (im)politeness, involving terms of address, intimacy markers, address verbs, politeness formulae and response forms. Findings point to a general trend towards more informal, less hierarchical and more intimate and offensive vocabulary, similarly to what has been found in the literature on telecinematic discourse in other languages. Overall, the corpus-based diachronic approach followed suggests that (im)politeness is especially foregrounded in film dialogues, as compared to non-scripted conversation.