Volume 9, Issue s3 - Special Issue: The Language of Science Fiction; Editors: Sofia Rüdiger, Claudia Lange

In this introduction, we provide a short rationale for the genesis of the special issue on “The language of science fiction” and introduce its main theme – science fiction, with particular consideration of the language of estrangement – and main methodological framework – corpus linguistics. In addition, we give an overview of the contributions and motivate their grouping into four parts: (1) the influence of science fiction on non-fictional language, (2) sociolinguistic variation, (3) science fiction and the mind, and (4) lexis and literature.

Since George Lucas’s film A New Hope was first screened in 1977, the Star Wars saga has become a pop-culture phenomenon incorporating films, videogames, books, merchandise, and a quasi-religious philosophy, but linguistic research on Star Wars is scarce and has mainly focused on language use in the films. There is as yet no investigation of the impact of Star Wars on the English language, and the present study fills this gap using corpus-linguistic methods to investigate the extent to which characteristic words and constructions from the Star Wars universe have become established in English. Five Star Wars -derived items included in the Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ), namely Jedi , Padawan , lightsabre (with spelling variants), Yoda , and the characteristic construction to the dark side were analysed regarding their frequency of occurrence in four corpora of present-day English (COCA, COHA, BNC, BNC Spoken 2014) and coded regarding their level of independence from the original films. The results show that over one-third of the uses of the investigated Star Wars -derived items are innovative (like the BNC example Other imbibers have gone over to the dark side of beer, rejecting the pasteurised lager produced by the breweries ) and thus well integrated into the English language.

“To boldly go where no man has gone before”, popularized by the science fiction series Star Trek , has provided an iconic example for the use of split infinitives. From its introduction, the series may have paved the way for the broader use of split infinitives in contemporary, informal English in spite of prescriptive grammars shunning the structure. The current qualitative and quantitative study is based on the general diachronic Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and a specific telecinematic corpus (TV Corpus). It aims to trace genre influence in the use of split infinitives in sci-fi and television discourses. It asks whether the use of split infinitives in informal genres can be correlated with its prominent use in the Star Trek series. The current study finds that both raw and relative frequencies increase in the wake of Star Trek , as well as the probability of choice. Yet the clearest influence from Star Trek stems from the spread of the iconic to boldly go phrase.

Research on emblems to date has not drawn on corpus methods that use public data. In this paper, we use corpus methods to explore the use of original fictional gestures in the real world. We look at two examples from popular science fiction, the Vulcan salute from Star Trek and the three-finger salute from The Hunger Games . First, a Twitter corpus of the Vulcan salute emoji shows that it is used to represent Star Trek fandom and wider nerd culture, alongside its use as a greeting. Second, a global news corpus shows the three-finger salute has come to be used as a pro-democracy protest gesture across political and cultural boundaries in South East Asia. These corpus studies show different trajectories for the two gestures, with the three-finger salute escaping the confines of its fictional world, while the Vulcan salute has come to stand in as a reference to the media it originated from. We conclude with a reflection on the opportunities, challenges, and limitations of bringing corpus methods to gesture studies.

This article investigates the language of men and women in Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: Discovery through corpus analysis. To that end, the transcripts of 13 episodes of The Original Series and five episodes of Discovery were analyzed. More specifically, this paper focuses on clause types, particularly interrogatives and imperatives, as well as interruptions and certain recurring phrases. Results indicate that the language of men and women is indicative of more gender equality in Discovery than in The Original Series .

Firefly is a TV series that aired in 2002 and 2003 in the United States. The series belongs to the space western subgenre, which allies science fiction and western tropes by layering, in this case, a dystopian society, space travel, standoffs in desolate landscapes, and saloon brawls. This juxtaposition of genres is reflected in the language of Firefly ’s characters in three ways: world-specific slang, Chinese code-switching, and features evoking Southern American English. This study explores the latter, employing quantitative methods used in variationist sociolinguistics. Using a corpus of all episodes of the series and the film Serenity (2005), we show that features reminiscent of Southern varieties of English, specifically nasal fronting and the use of ain’t , are stratified according to the social realities of the world of Firefly . Nonstandard linguistic variants are used to represent rebel smugglers as opposed to characters representing valued professions. This pattern contributes to world-building in Firefly by indexing divisions between the superpower-controlled territories and the recently settled edge of the universe. The use of realistically constrained Southern linguistic features draws upon present-day notions of linguistic (non)standardness to indicate marginality. Firefly therefore relies on its audience’s linguistic knowledge of the real world to create its fictional one.

Characters in science fiction TV have to move through the universe at the speed which the plot necessitates. In Star Trek , characters can beam from one location to another in an instant. In the visual modality, there is no continuous path of motion between the source and the goal, which would technically disqualify beam from most linguistic definitions of motion. This study aims to map out the usage patterns of beam and investigate whether or not it is linguistically construed as motion within the show. The study is based on a section of the TV Corpus (Davies, Mark. 2019. The TV Corpus. https://www.english-corpora.org/tv/ (accessed 28 May 2022)) consisting of all available episodes of all Star Trek TV series between 1966 and 2005 and uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. The study found that beam is indeed used as a motion verb within the series. Its usage is also quite varied, denoting motion of many different figures in many different directions. The fact that we conceive of beaming as motion even though there is no continuous path might be partly explained by the etymology of beam , and partly by the embodied nature of language. Our current register makes it is hard to imagine transportation without movement.

In 1960s American science fiction, representations of altered consciousness may function as a novum, framing how protagonists perceive and interact with the storyworld, motivating their actions, and estranging readers. Representations of these states are rooted in the lexical particulars of style, which became of central concern to the rising New Wave subgenre. As a result of the defamiliarized focalization of altered consciousness, estranged readers confront in fresh ways core sociocultural concerns of the era embedded in the thematics of the novels. For this reason, it is fruitful to ask how the language of altered consciousness can be characterized. What lexical elements defamiliarize the focalization giving rise to estrangement? This paper addresses this question through a computational literary linguistic approach. Quantifying the lexical composition of altered states with content analysis dictionaries and performing cluster analysis uncovers underlying similarities within a corpus of 1960s American science fiction novels. The language of altered consciousness is then identified as a language of estrangement through stylistic close reading. This provides one route into understanding how a novum may be constructed of language, estrange the reader, and prompt reexamination of the formerly familiar through staying with strangeness.

As can be witnessed in projects such as The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (Prucher, Jeff. 2007. Brave new words: The Oxford dictionary of science fiction . Oxford: Oxford University Press), science fiction has been fertile ground for the creation of new words and concepts. Whereas the aforementioned dictionary was constructed by eliciting examples and citations from volunteers, this paper presents an initial foray into data-driven methods for uncovering lexis unique to science fiction. Words unique to science fiction texts are extracted by comparing a science fiction corpus against the British National Corpus (BNC Consortium. 2007. The British National Corpus, XML edition . Oxford Text Archive. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12024/2554 (accessed 29 June 2022)) to produce a list of 306 neologisms from 74 texts. In addition, this study seeks to examine the ways in which authors impart the meaning of such words to the reader, drawing on frameworks of semantic word relations and work in cognitive linguistics. This reveals the use of definitions and glosses by the authors, both in narration and direct speech, co-occurrence with synonyms, and the drip-feeding of attributes pertaining to the concept being referenced. In addition, characters can be shown to struggle with the concepts to which neologisms refer, allowing authors to explore themes of alienation and other-worldliness.

The goal of this paper is to offer an analysis of cyberpunk , steampunk , and other genre names related via the punk element. We study the emergence and popularity of these names among science fiction fans and scholars, comparing them with “mainstream” appreciators. We carry out a corpus study that analyses data extracted from textual corpora in four languages (English, German, French, and Italian) and encyclopedias (fandom communities, e.g., Aesthetics Wiki). We show that the proliferation of punk genre names tends to be closely related to science fiction and other (fan-)fiction communities, who display an emotive and intellectual investment in punk subgenres. We propose an analysis via a frame-theoretical model that shows how cyberpunk and related genre names can describe the core narrative themes of each subgenre. We then propose that punk genre names form sets of near-synonym words via their ability to describe fictional narratives featuring anti-authoritarian protagonists across different world settings and technologies. We conclude by discussing the consequences of our account for possible theories of genres, genre names, and linguistic studies focusing on science fiction and other fictional genres.