Old wine in new bottles. The case of the adjacency-pair framework revisited

This study reports on the preliminary stages of a project concerned with presenting a systematic framework for annotating and analysing film dialogue which blends corpus annotation with adjacency pair theory (Schegloff, Sacks 1973). The adjacency pair model, which consists of closed sets of pairs, is applied to a searchable online corpus in which all the episodes of the U.S. medical drama House M.D. are transcribed and divided into scenes, the basic search unit. The article describes the modifications and adjustments to the original adjacency-pair model in order to accommodate the highly specialized dialogue of medical settings not envisaged by Schegloff and Sacks (1973) and the different interpersonal relationships between the characters, as well as the complex intersemiotic interactions characterizing TV film series.