Legal drama and popularization: a macro and micro-linguistic analysis of the genre

The view on ESP has recently started to expand beyond the traditional ‘utilitarian’ and ‘practical’ perspective and to consider special languages as somehow connected to literary, artistic and even entertainment purposes. A certain number of studies on popularization, for example, have focused on the way specialized knowledge can be transmitted via new media and forms of entertainment (see, inter alia, Caliendo and Compagnone 2014 on TED Talks). In particular, Petit (1999) paved the way to an investigation of FASP (Fiction à Substrat Professionnel) and of special languages within fictional narrative, which has later evolved in studies on TV series as a means for acquisition of ESP (Isani 2004, 2006a, 2006b, Chapon 2011), including the acquisition of professional competence via legal dramas (O’ Connell 2012). In the light of this trend, this research aims at investigating TV fiction as a means of popularization of specialized knowledge, with a focus on legal discourse. A corpus made of the episodes of three legal dramas (Boston Legal, Suits and The Good Wife) is collected and analyzed to provide a twofold view on specialized languages in TV series. First, a micro-linguistic analysis of the scenes staging interactions in legal settings will provide an overview of the main popularization strategies exploited by the fiction authors to convey legal specific contents to a generally uninformed audience, demonstrating that legal dramas exploit many of the strategies identified in other popularizing contexts and genres (Heffer 2005, Calsamiglia and van Dijk 2004, Gülich 2003, Garzone 2006), with the addition of some genre-specific strategies and patterns. Second, a macro-linguistic analysis compares the main features identified in each phase of the trial (Anesa 2013, Cotterill 2003) and their fictional reproductions. This will show that the popularization of specialized legal knowledge also exploits the ‘appropriation’ and the ‘embedding’ (Bhatia 1997, 2004) of different legal genres taking place within legal drama