Focal Prominence Through Preposing: A Syntactic-discourse Analysis of Telecinematic Discourse

Abstract

The current study investigates the phenomenon of preposing (i.e. fronting) in the British series “Downton Abbey”. The first two seasons of the series are the data of the study. The analysis focuses on how characters that belong to different social classes use this syntactic structure to perform different discourse functions. The study adopts Carter and McCarthy’s (2006) classification of marked structures for analysing the unusual word order in English. As matter of fact, preposing was extensively studied. However, this study attempts to highlight how this construction may interact with social variables such as class and status, especially within telecinematic.  The main objective here is to examine whether preposing patterns differ according to the social class of the characters. Instances from season one and two are analysed both quantitively by calculating frequencies to examine if there is a statistically significant relationship between preposing and social class using Chi-square test and qualitatively by demonstrating the pragmatic function of specific instances. The study reveals that the upper-class characters favor complex syntactic structure. However, both social classes (the upper and lower classes) used preposing with comparable frequencies. The analysis confirms that preposing functions as a shared discourse-functional recourse for all speakers, while social stratification appears more clearly via other linguistic features such as lexical formality and clause complexity.