Conversational Charateristics In Movies

This thesis aims to study the conversational characteristics in movies-fluency and dysfluency. The author adopted nearly 30 American movies in the 1990s from different genres,and built up a movie scripts corpus of more than 250,000 words. Some scientific methods were adopted to perform the analytical work,such as the SNOBL4 programs,the FOXPFO software and case analysis.It is proved that conversation in movies is fluent speech. It comes from the normal daily language and has all types of the fluent phenomena that daily language contains. But in order to fully represent the real life,dysfluent phenomena can also be found in movies. All types of dysfluent phenomena are present in movies,but the frequency of the dysfluent signal such as pause,repeat,etc. is much lower. So it is safe to say that conversation in movies is much more fluent than the normal spontaneous conversation.