The portrayal of intergenerational bilingual contexts in TV seriesfrom a multimodal perspective: the case ofthe Villanueva familyin Jane the Virgin

Treball Final de Grau en Estudis Anglesos. Codi: EA0938. Curs acadèmic: 2020/2021Over the last few decades, television and film companies have started to show more linguistic diversity in their productionsby portraying bilingual and even multilingual scenariosin anattemptto incorporatemore realism in their shows.More than fifty years ago,Cooper and Greenfield(1969)alreadyconductedresearchon language use on the part of bilingual communities and on how differences between generations are multimodally supported. This kind of studies show that every language choice made is drivenand influencedby determining factors such as age, generation, social contextand, nowadays,the language of the social networks.It is also a fact thatbilingual speakers interact with their second language differently depending on the contexts andonhow integrated they are into the culture. Focusing on the TV series Jane the Virgin, this study aims to determine how intergenerational bilingual contexts arelinguistically andmultimodallyconstructed,supported and portrayed in this particularshowas a way to better understand the multiple semiotic resourcesat play and the many existing possibilities for realistically portraying multi-language scenarios in an audiovisual genre such as a TV series. With this aim in mind, a series ofcarefully selectedbilingualscenes were analysed from a multimodal and linguistic perspective. The analysis was made on the basis ofthe script, the audioand the images of the scenes in order to examinetheir most prominentlinguistic, oral and visual aspects,their integration and the resulting multimodal ensemble. The results suggest that there are different forms of bilingualism inside bilingual intergenerational communitiesdependingonthe character,his/herassociated features andhie/her level ofintegration in the culture