Investigating historical fiction in the TV Corpus

Fiction set in the past is linguistically special, since representing the past in fiction typically requires making stylistic choices to convey a sense of ‘old-timey’-ness. Using the TV Corpus and the historical fiction dialogue it contains, which amounts to over 13 million words, this study investigates what makes the language of historical fiction distinct from other types of fiction on television. This is done by analyzing keywords, key parts of speech, and key semantic domains in the corpus. Results show that, compared to television generally, historical fiction greatly overuses modal verbs, terms of address, the perfect aspect and the passive voice, while it underuses features of orality, discourse markers, contracted forms, profanity and the progressive aspect. The paper argues that writers of historical fiction take advantage of the overlap of formal language and conservative (therefore older) speech to construct pseudo-historical dialogue. Importantly, the data implies that writers do pick up on real principles of language change and exploit this knowledge in their craft.