Text Versus Screen: A Linguistic Comparison of Selected English Novels and Their Film Adaptations

This paper aims to analyse the linguistic features of ten English novels and their adaptations into films using Biber’s multidimensional analysis framework. The paper compares and contrasts the various linguistic features of novels and movies. Dividing each text into three equal parts, the MAT (Multidimensional Analysis Tagger) was applied. Descriptive statistics and the results of an ANOVA were then analysed using SPSS. The study indicates that movie subtitles are semantically more straightforward as they occupy limited space and time, while novels use more elaborate vocabulary. Movies are more involved, non-narrative, non-argumentative, non-abstract, and less explicit than novels. The present research contributes to the existing knowledge by providing a clearer picture of the connection between the narrative form and the linguistic manifestation and helpful information on how language adapts to the new media.