Creativity & television drama: a corpus-based ...

CREATIVITY & TELEVISION DRAMA: A CORPUS-BASED MULTIMODAL ANALYSIS OF PATTERN-REFORMING CREATIVITY IN HOUSE M.D. Manuscript submitted to The Open University of Hong Kong for RIDCH Conference 2016 © Locky LAW 2016. Please do not copy or quote without permission.

LAW, Locky [email protected]

Manuscript submitted to The Open University of Hong Kong for RIDCH Conference 2016 © Locky LAW 2016. Please do not copy or quote without permission.

Creativity & television drama: a corpus-based multimodal analysis of patternreforming creativity in House M.D. Locky Law Department of English The Hong Kong Polytechnic University [email protected]

Abstract As of today, research on the use of creative language is still in its infancy. Carter's (2004) theory of creativity in everyday common talk is by far the most influential in the field. Television drama, despite receiving global popularity, receives little attention from linguistics field. This study aims to explore the “common ground” in television drama dialogue and linguistic creativity (Richardson 2010, 194) through deciphering how pattern-reforming creativity is realised through screenplay, telecinematography and acting as meaningmaking strategies. Using dialogues from TV medical dramedy House M.D. as data, a corpus was created to facilitate the extraction of pattern-reforming creativity such as neologism, portmanteaus and slang. The extracted data was then analysed using a corpus linguistic approach to multimodal discourse analysis. The analysis reveals a strong association of pattern-reforming creativity production with actor’s facial performance realized interpersonally by certain types of telecinematic resources such as visual framing, camera angle, camera movement and proxemics. This research is a pioneering effort in linking up linguistic creativity with multimodality as well as a positive driving force towards research in telecinematic discourse. Keywords: creativity; telecinematic discourse, TV drama; pattern-reforming; multimodal discourse; corpus;

Introduction “Read less, more TV.” – House M.D.

This essay explores creative language in television drama dialogues of House M.D. and proposes a corpus-based multimodal analysis of the drama’s pattern-reforming creativity, one type of linguistic creativity hypothesized by Carter (2004). Since ancient times, creativity has been one of the most intriguing and debatable phenomena. Its definitions vary with time and culture (Carter 2004), from creation to invention (Maslow 1962, Kemlo 2008) and ranging from being a product of sanity to a symptom of insanity (Forrest 1696, Folley and Park 2005), yet it is precisely such abstraction that has hindered its research development. Linguists have only begun their research in the lexicogrammatical forms of creativity in the 1950s, focusing mainly on its written form rather than spoken, and rarely on the language and language use (Carter 2004). The global popularity of


television drama has drawn over 3000 non-linguistic journal articles on television studies between 1995 and 2004 (Allen 2004, Bednarek 2010), yet has not caught the eyes of linguists or educators (Pennycook 2007, Bednarek 2010, Androutsopoulos 2012). House M.D. is a unique creative instance in the modern television history of medical dramedy (Li and Csikszentmihalyi 2014), one that takes a completely different approach to conventional medical dramedies such as ER and Grey’s Anatomy by building the show around one single central character (Season 8, Swan Song), providing longitudinality in the creativeness of its repertoire and subsequently, an opportunity for the studies of creative language use to expand beyond the written form and into the scripted spoken counterpart. Even with the suitable data however, there are several issues which researchers might encounter in in the research of creativity in television drama. Carter’s (2004) theory on everyday linguistic creativity in spoken interaction may have provided a framework applicable to both spoken and written discourse (Vo and Carter 2010), which in theory can be mapped onto television drama dialogues in the spoken form (performed by actors as “mediated” “represented talk”) (Richardson 2010, 177) and written form (as written texts on scripts) (Vo and Carter 2010) respectively, but creativity is a multimodal process and textual analysis alone is insufficient in describing creativity realised through non-verbal channels (Finnegan 2002, Carter 2004, Carter and McCarthy 2004). Limited by the current technology, success in a holistic approach to the automated extraction of linguistic creativity from video-corpora is far from being achieved. Without an effective automated extraction program, researchers of corpus studies on creative language use, unless supported by computer programmers or is programming-capable themselves, are resorted to manual selection strategies. This article proposes a simple, non-programming corpus linguistic approach to multimodal analysis of pattern-reforming creativity such as neologism, portmanteau and slang in the creative medical detective TV dramedy House M.D.. WordSmith Tools and Microsoft Excel are selected as the software for this study. There are four main sections in this paper. The first section reviews the relevant literature of creativity, the creative language studies of television drama dialogue and the dramedy House M.D.. The second section describes the method involved in the selection of reference corpus and the construction of television drama dialogue corpus. The third section details the three main steps involved in the analysis, including the extraction of pattern-reforming creativity using WordSmith Tools, the multimodal transcription of the corresponding video segments and the use of several basic Microsoft Excel tools in quantifying multimodal discourse of the television. Finally, the paper concludes by suggesting possible future research towards the same direction.

Literature Review Creativity For centuries, conceptions of ‘creativity’ have seesawed between two ends of a spectrum: creation and invention (Sawyer 2006, Carter 2004, Macfarlane 2007). In general, creation creativity originates from a conative (Maslow 1962), unconscious mind (Sawyer 2006) without pre-acquired


knowledge of any similar ideas, producing an original and individual thought (Carter 2004) at “noumenal moments of afflatus or inspiration” (Macfarlane 2007, 6) whereas invention creativity is a rational, conscious decision (Sawyer 2006) involving active analytical, self-disciplinary and laborious effort of constructing upon original knowledge (Maslow 1962) and pre-existing materials (Macfarlane 2007, Carter 2004). The origin of debate on the definition of linguistic creativity can be traced back to the mid/late eighteenth century when Romanticism began to transform various arts and literature forms (Brians 2004), a time when Shakespeare was hailed as the “paragon of original genius” who was the definitive pioneer of the idea of creation ex nihilo (‘out of nothing’ in Latin), an idol and a role model for many Romantic poets (Macfarlane 2007). The Victorian era of British history (1837 - 1901) marked an intellectually and spiritually enlightening period in which many cultural elements such as entertainment, arts and literature feverishly blossomed (Fletcher 1919). Poetry, novel, play, theatre, drama and opera were amongst the most influential Elizabethan literature forms (Fletcher 1919). The Sherlock Holmes series published between 1880 and 1914 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 – 1930), for instance, is a masterpiece of the time (Edwards 2013) and a creative pillar central to many modern age fictions and television dramas, including House M.D. This study adopts the perspective of linguistic creativity that is theorised by Carter (2004, 9), who views creative language use as “a marked breaking or bending or rules and norms of language, including a deliberate play with its forms and its potential for meaning.” In his seminal work, he proposes a creativity hypothesis in all common talk by placing two types of creativity in emphasis – pattern-reforming and pattern-forming creativity. The former being “creativity by displacement of fixedness, reforming and reshaping patterns of language” while the latter being “creativity via conformity to language rules rather than breaking them, creating convergence, symmetry and greater mutuality between interlocutors” (Vo and Carter 2010, 303). Creative language studies of television drama dialogue The invention of television in the 1920s and fast popularization of television drama in the 1930s in the UK (Marcus 2005) and 1950s in the US (Douglas 2007, Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation 2014) paved the road for the branching of creativity from its pure literary forms to the analogue form on the small screen. From the transmission of full-length Shakespeare play (Norman 1984) to live dramas and eventually to the original production of multi-episodic drama series (Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation 2014, Marcus 2005), television drama has continuously evolved around much enthusiastic creativity which brought about the ‘golden age’ of television (Everett 1997, Douglas 2007). Amidst all great success however, creativity was widely deemed too much of a “spiritual or transcendent” process that have exceeded the capability of any forms of scientific investigations or analyses, causing serious shortfalls in research in creativity at the time (Carter 2004, 25).


Situation had improved since the invention of electronic corpora in the latter half of the twentieth century. Interest in creative language studies soared as research coverage expanded to nonliterary texts (Vo and Carter 2010) such as creative language use in spoken discourse (Carter and McCarthy 1999, Carter 2004), advertising copy (Carter 1999, Carter and McCarthy 2004), newspaper headlines (Carter and McCarthy 2004) and jokes (Chiaro 1992, Carter and McCarthy 2004). Yet, few have attempted to put forth a detailed study to discover and characterise creativity within television drama as a form of literary arts, or within its dialogue as form of non-literary written text. Technical issues could have hindered the development of creative language studies (Wynne 2005). The enormous amount of time required for tedious transcription work of tens or even hundreds of episodes could have been one of the negative impulses, given that DVDs with subtitles, the internet, and transcript sharing through the web had not been popularised until the 1990s. However, a much bigger issue would be the significant disproportion of developmental driving forces between the classic literary texts and the ‘young’ television drama dialogue (Piazza, Bednarek and Rossi 2011). Bignell and Lacey (2005, 3) argues that the latter is “a genre that began as a popular and devalued literary form…equally as popular and devalued in contrast to literature or cinema”. Richardson (2010, 194) explains such phenomenon by saying that “because the literary language of plays, poems, and prose fiction is intended to be special, artful and valuable, no special pleading is necessary to justify studying that”. Whereas television drama dialogue “would not be judged good or bad, creative or familiar, because it would never be thought interesting enough, socially or aesthetically, to be worth examining” (Richardson 2010, 194). This linguistic negligence, or repulsion, is further exposed by the thriving contributions of research on television drama dialogue from various other fields (Bednarek 2010) such as philosophy (Jacoby and Irwin 2008), psychology (Cascio and Martin 2011, Jamieson 2011, Whitbourne 2012, Clyman 2009), cultural studies (Cover 2004, Chua 2008, Song 2010), media studies (Munt 2006, Challen 2007, Chua 2008, Barnett 2010) and medical humanities (Goodier and Arrington 2007), to name a few. With over 3000 non-linguistic journal articles on television studies between 1995 and 2004 (Allen 2004, Bednarek 2010), the push for studies using television drama dialogue from the linguistic area, in summary, has been less than adequate. As a result, much of the worthy linguistic features embedded in the television drama dialogue such as linguistic creativity is left severely underexplored. Although early attempt to analyse television drama dialogues can be traced back to the work of Baron (1974) in the research of linguistic structure of television drama, most linguistic studies of television drama dialogues searchable on the internet are the products of the post-2000 and of very limited numbers. One earlier attempt was by Maynard (2001) who analysed the emotive meanings of


strategies in a mode of Japanese discourse from a Japanese television drama series Majo no Jooken (Conditions of a Witch) through Conversation Analysis (CA) and Discourse Analysis (DA) methods. Realizing “the urgent need … for a treatment of fictional cinema and television from various linguistic perspectives” (Piazza, Bednarek and Rossi 2011, 2), several scholars have contributed in the investigation of dialogues of some well-known television dramas. Chamber (2003) looks at the political discourse through close analysis of the dialogues in one particular episode of The West Wing. Brock (2004) analyses scripts in humorous communications and suggests the viability of dual-script analysis. Bubel (2006) performs a qualitative analysis from Conversation Analysis (CA) on the dialogues of the American television drama Sex and the City to understand the characters’ relationship perceived by the audience. Quaglio (2008), using Biber’s multidimensional methodology (Biber 1988) and his functional analysis tools (Biber et al., 1999), compares corpus of the American situation comedy Friends with the American English Conversation subcorpus of the Longman Grammar Corpus to determine their resemblance and thus the sitcom’s suitability as an ESL face-to-face conversation teaching resource. Stokoe (2008) adopts CA to explore the dispreferred turns and breaches in relation to the interactional production of humour in television sitcoms. Bednarek (2010) provides a comprehensive analysis of the fictional television series Gilmore Girls and identity characterisation through corpus linguistics and multimodal discourse analysis in parallel. Finally, Richardson (2010) spends a chapter of her book discussing the impoliteness of Dr. Gregory House of House M.D. qualitatively. By adopting a range of approaches from critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, to corpus stylistics, researchers have successfully yielded significant linguistic insights. These attempts have demonstrated that television drama is not only indeed a plentiful resource waiting to be explored and exploited, but also a unique form of “mediated” text rich in language and in culture (Richardson 2010, 177) – “the true heir to great literature” in literary agent Steven Axelrod’s words (Lavery 2012) – which deserves the same level of attention as its cinematic counterpart. In the following subsection, a brief description of the television dramedy House M.D. will be provided. House M.D. – dramedy of creativity House M.D.is an American television medical ‘dramedy’ stretching eight seasons with a total of 177 episodes aired on the FOX Network from 16th November 2004 to 21st May 2012 (Wikia 2014). The series is based on the premise as well as the title of the pilot, “Everybody lies” (Werts 2009), a motto inscribed deep in the mind of Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie), the main character who is inspired by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s renowned fictional detective Sherlock Holmes (Slate 2006). House is a pain medication-dependent, arrogant, misanthropic, genius diagnostician who heads an innovative Department of Diagnostic Medicine at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital (PPTH) in New Jersey (Jauhar 2005, Jensen 2005).


House M.D. is selected for a number of strong reasons. Firstly, it is written with creativity and language quality very much worth exploring and exploiting. Accomplished director of photography of House M.D. Gale Tattersall, who commented in an interview by Olson (2010), “I think the writing is so superior to a lot of other television shows and also more to the point I think the scriptwriting is usually much more polished than anything you see in 70% of the movies these days, the writing is fantastic!... It has been a constant challenge and I absolutely loved it! (9:20 - 9:52)

Such proposition is in line with Richardson’s (2010, 194), “On the formal side, a possibility exists that dramatic dialogue, approached in the right way, might provide access to patterns of language behavior not (yet) discovered or fully explored in naturally occurring spontaneous interaction – might, indeed, be manifesting its creativity by expressively displaying those patterns. The fake banter exchanges in House … are an instance of this.”

Secondly, it is a popular television program which has set 3 Guinness World Records (namely the world’s most popular TV show, the world’s most watched man on television and the world's highest-paid TV actor in a drama series), as well as winning 2 Golden Globes, 49 awards and 112 nominations. Bignell and Lacey (2005, 6) argues that “it is television’s very familiarity, and its conventional focus upon the familiar, the present time and the everyday, that opens up alternative formal and stylistic possibilities.” Bednarek (2010) echoes that popularity of television and programmes alone is worthy of study due to its significant impact on our daily lives and societies. Thirdly, the main character Dr. Gregory House has been the inspiration for many publications from medical science (Sanders 2009, Holtz 2006, 2011) , philosophy (Jacoby and Irwin 2008), psychology (Clyman 2009, Jamieson 2011, Cascio and Martin 2011, Whitbourne 2012, Li and Csikszentmihalyi 2014) and media studies (Holtz 2011, Hockley and Gardner 2011, Jackman and Laurie 2010), thereby playing a critical role in the construction of popular memory (Bignell and Lacey 2005) and in the academia. From the linguistics perspective, there have been a handful of small-scale attempts to discuss the character’s sarcasm and meanness (Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann 2003, Culpeper 2005, Richardson 2010), a proper full-scale research is anticipated nonetheless. The next section will reveal the choice of reference corpus and the construction of House M.D. dialogue corpus as well as a brief overview of analytical methods used.

Method In order to facilitate the analysis of this study, there are two steps involved in the preparation: the selection of a reference corpus which best suits the data and the creation of a dialogue corpus using the data.


Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) In the extraction of linguistic creativity, the choice of reference corpus is a determining factor. Among all the available corpora, only COCA fits best for the purpose of this case study. COCA is selected as the reference corpus for this study for a number of key reasons: (1) Since House M.D. is set in New Jersey, USA, and creativity is “culture-bound” (Carter 2004, 47), therefore only a corpus of American English is deemed appropriate. (2) The extraction of creative language from a near 1-million-word HMDC required the use of large, balanced and up-to-date corpus of American English such that it can cover a wide range of vocabulary of various genres, including those from the medical category. (3) House M.D. was broadcasted from November 16, 2004 to May 21, 2012. Since creativity is “time-bound” (Carter 2004, 47), a corpus which covers this period will be best for creative language searching. (4) Since TV drama dialogues belong to a (scripted) written form of spoken language, the reference corpus should include both written and spoken data. (5) Spoken corpus larger than 1 million is rare. The Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBCSAE), for example, is of 249,000 words. For the case of House M.D., the total number of words in all dialogues adds up to almost 1 million, thus corpus such as SBCSAE is relatively small to be used a filter for creative language. The benefits of COCA meet all criteria above. As “the largest freely-available corpus of English, and the only large and balanced corpus of American English” (Davies 2008), COCA contains more than 450 million words in 189,431 texts equally divided in 5 genres: spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers and academic journals, including 20 million words each year from 1990-2012 with the most recent addition of texts (Apr 2011 - Jun 2012) completed in June 2012 (Davies 2008). The spoken part of COCA (hereafter referred to as COCA Spoken) contains 95 million words [95,385,672] of transcripts of unscripted conversation from more than 150 different TV and radio programs such as All Things Considered (NPR), Newshour (PBS), Good Morning America (ABC), Today Show (NBC), 60 Minutes (CBS), Hannity and Colmes (Fox), Jerry Springer, etc (Davies 2008). COCA Spoken is arguably an authentic representation of actual spoken conversation given its data is about 95% unscripted with “overwhelming” amount of discourse markers (Davies 2008, 2014). In addition, a close examination of the corpus shows that it includes interviews with medical experts, hence medical terms relevant for this study.


Figure 1 Raw fan script of a House M.D. episode from the Internet

House M.D. Corpus (HMDC) The construction of the House M.D. dialogue corpus (HMDC) involves three major steps: step one is the data collection of House M.D. fan script of every episode from the internet (therefore not the original screenwriters’ scripts) as shown in Error! Reference source not found.. Step two is the removal of all non-dialogue elements such as fade-ins, scene headings, action sequences, scene transitions, mood brackets, parentheticals, commercial tags and character name tags, resulting in ‘pure’ dialogues stored as txt-format in 177 individual files (one file per episode) which form a raw, unscripted and unannotated version of HMDC, as shown in Error! Reference source not found..


Figure 2 Cleaned dialogues of a House M.D. episode

Step three is to improve accuracy of the transcribed dialogues in the HMDC. Spell checks, in particular, were greatly assisted by Google and internet resources to minimise negative effect to analytical outcomes caused by corporal impurities. The result is a 927,922-word cleaned dialogue HMDC. The HMDC wordlist and a COCA wordlist consisting of 23,466 and 1,023,565 entries respectively. In the next section, the theories and steps applied in the analysis will be detailed.

Analysis The analysis of this study involves three major steps: the extraction of pattern-reforming creativity, multimodal transcription and finally quantifying the pattern-reforming creativity. One of the most basic extraction methods of useful information in the field of corpus linguistics involves the observed absolute frequency (Gries 2010). In general, given a fixed domain, the higher the frequency of occurrence, the stronger the evidence. Conversely, what does a low frequency count imply? Hapax legomenon – a word which occurs only once in a corpus (Scott and Tribble 2006), despite being proposed as a measurement of expansion of morphological productivity in word formation (Verheij 2000, Gaeta and Ricca 2005), is generally investigated to be excluded from statistical calculations, language teaching and language processing due to its low individual frequency count, high percentage of presence and its high lexical variety (Nakamura 1987, Scott and


Tribble 2006, Jurafsky and Martin 2009, Oakes 2009). However, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, it is precisely among these hapax legomena, and even dis legomena, tris legomena that neologisms – one type of pattern-reforming creativity – are primarily found (Baayen and Renouf 1996, Plag 2003). Achieving automatic extraction of neologism is far from easy (Davies 2014). Most dictionary publishers, including Oxford University Press, “still use a manual system of trawling for neologisms in a range of sources, either using their own staff or subscribing to a new words collection service such as the Camlex New Words Service.” (Walter 2010, 437) Indeed, there is a number of semiautomatic neologism taggers in various stages of development which adopt the exclusion list method. For example, NeoTrack uses the MorDeBe Portuguese database to extract orthographic neologisms (Janssen 2005), NeoTag uses the OSLIN database1 to train against the IULA Gold Standard corpus for Spanish and is able to detect grammatical neologism in Spanish with 70%-93% accuracy (Janssen, NeoTag: a POS Tagger for Grammatical Neologism Detection 2012), and NeoDet uses The British National Corpus (BNC) in conjunction with several exclusion sources to extract neologism in English (Grochocka 2013). The first two are not specifically developed for English, none of the above is published and made publicly available for download. Unless the researchers are computer programming-capable such that they can develop their own software, without access to these semiautomatic neologism tagging programmes, we are resorted to common language processing programs such as Wordsmith Tools (paid), Concgram (paid), Antconc (free) and ubiquitous data processing tools such as Microsoft Excel. It has been suggested that the identification of neologisms can be performed with or without the assistance of a monitor corpus (Walter 2010, Davies 2014), a time-tagged corpus which monitors the changes in a language by constantly replacing old texts with new ones while comparing it to a stable reference set (Sinclair 1982, Clear 1987, Tognini-Bonelli 2010). Without a monitor corpus, Walter (2010) suggests manually comparing words’ occurrence per ten million with an existing wordlist as reference. Even with a monitor corpus such as COCA, by far “the only publicly-accessible monitor corpus”, the imperfection of the CLAWS7 tagger means that data will be noisy and refinement will take considerable time and manual work (Davies 2014). Therefore, since manual searching is inevitable, the key question is what filtering criteria should be applied in the extraction in order to minimise time wastage by reducing noise in the data. Extraction of pattern-reforming creativity In statistical signifance testing, a p-value is the probability of yielding a particular result equal to or more extreme than what was actually observed, based on the assumption that null hypothesis is true (Goodman 1999). For the case of pattern reforming creativity extraction, the p-value must be set to its maximum possible value allowed by WordSmith Tools. By setting Max. p-value to “1.”, it implies that the confidence / significance level is approximately 1, which in turn implies that the 1

Stands for Open Source Lexical Information Network, available in Portuguese, Catalan, Spanish and Russian


importance of inclusion of every single word in a corpus very much completely outweighs the rejection of null hypothesis. A HMDC keyword list (known as KeyWords on WordSmith Tools) was then created based on the following settings: Max. p-value = 1.; Log likelihood = selected; Exclude negative KWs = checked; Max.wanted = default; Min.frequency = 1; Min. % of texts = 0.0%; Max. link calc. frequency = default; Min.cluster frequency = 1; Min.link frequency = 1; Link span = 5 to 5; Min. link strength = 1; minimum frequency for database = 1; min. KWs per text = default; minimum texts = 3; statistic = MI3; minimum strength = 0.000; The results of the above settings yielded a keyword list of 9140 entries as shown in Error! Reference source not found..


Figure 3. HMDC Keyword list using COCA as reference corpus, ranked by frequency

Figure 4. "Zamyloidosis", an instance of pattern-reforming creativity, is highlighted in the HMDC-COCA keyword list.


The key to the extraction of pattern-reforming creative language is the presence of a lexical item in HMDC and its absence in COCA. Translating this into numbers, it means zero2 occurrence in the reference corpus (i.e. RC. Freq. = 0). Using these main criteria as a filter, a list of 660 potential pattern-reforming creative lexical items was obtained. This keyword list was then exported as Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and underwent manual categorisation based on the items’ nature in context, as shown in Error! Reference source not found..

Figure 5. Categorised list of potential pattern-reforming creative lexical items

While tokens of pattern-reforming creativity such as neologisms, portmanteau and slang are retained, non-creative tokens which belong to the following types are rejected:     

2

Medical terminologies (eg. disease names, medicine names) Proper nouns (eg. character’s names, place names) Acronyms (eg. ‘GFIS’, ‘MIDNIT’) Gibberish (eg. ‘teelingent’, ‘valutate’) Onomatopoeia (eg. ‘CAWWWW’, BUZZZZZZZ”)

“Words which do not occur at all in the reference corpus are treated as if they occurred 5.0e-324 times (0.0000000 and

loads more zeroes before a 5) in such a case.” (See How Key Words are Calculated in Scott (2014))


 

Unfinished words Spelling errors

After the spelling errors had been corrected and re-categorised, a list of 114 pattern-reforming creative items was produced, that is 17.27% of the 660 potential pattern-reforming creative lexical items (=114 / 660) and 0.486% of the HMDC wordlist (= 114 / 23,466). These 114 creative items contribute 128 instances of occurrence in the television drama as some of the items consist of multiple instances. At this point, these instances were ready for multimodal transcriptions.

Multimodal Transcription One of the key challenges faced in multimodal analysis of video is the huge amount of semiotic resources required to be transcribed and annotated for a relatively short clip. Although advancement in technology in the last few decades have helped the development of computer-assisted multimodal recognition and analysis (Adolphs and Carter 2007), a fully automated system capable of high speed, high accuracy in-talk multimodal encoding is yet to be invented (Knight, et al. 2008). The manual approach remains a crucial strategy for most multimodal corpus researchers despite the high time cost. However, with the help of Microsoft Excel and a transcription framework as suggested below, analysis can still be performed in a rather efficient and effective manner.


Figure 6. Retrieving information from video segment of creativity

While the extraction of pattern-reforming and pattern-forming creativity uses different tools and filtering criteria, the analysis of the two creativity types adopts the same multimodal framework. Each instance of creative item obtained from the extraction process required the corresponding video segment retrieved and numbered according to the respective season (Season), episode (Episode) and time (Time Stamp) as shown in Error! Reference source not found.. Screen captures of the dramedy at the moment of creative language production (Salient Visual Frame) were also added for easy pictorial reference. The framework for multimodal transcription of creative video segments, which is modelled from the framework proposed by O’Halloran et al. (2010), includes the following semiotic variables (Figure 7):


Figure 7. Excel spreadsheet for multimodal transcription

VISUAL MODE: Cinematography:   

Camera Angle Camera Movement Visual Framing

AUDITORY MODE: Soundtrack:  

Music, Song Speech/Narration

SOMATIC MODE: Kinesics:  

Music, Song Kinesic Actions: o Physical Movement in Space o Gesture



Kinesic Expression/Display: o Facial Expression o Gaze



Kinesic Orientation: o Proxemics o Stance, Posture



CREATIVITY: o Instance o Pattern-forming / Pattern-reforming o Nature o Participant

It is worth noting that certain attribute values of the above semiotic variables namely intimate space, personal space, social space, public space of proxemics are based on anthropologist Edward T.


Hall (1966, 71-72), and close-up, medium shot and long shot of visual framing are based on Kress and van Leeuwen (2006 [1996], 124). Other attribute values including Camera Angle: high, eyelevel, waist-level, low; Camera Movement: stationary, tracking shot, hand-held shot, walk-and-talk, tilt shot, zooming in; Visual Framing: over-the-shoulder shot, two shot, POV shot, wide shot are based on common terms used in film studies while the rest are classifications based on the actual performance of the actors.

Figure 8. House talking to Sister Mary Eucharist in Damned If You Do

For example, Error! Reference source not found. shows a screen capture of an instance of creative language production extracted from HMDC. It appears in Season 1 Episode 5 between the time 00:18:47 and 00:18:52 in the format of hh:mm:ss. The Salient Visual Frame stores the most significant frame of the drama at the moment of creative language production. In this instance as shown in Error! Reference source not found. and Error! Reference source not found., under VISUAL MODE: Cinematography, Camera Angle is at the eye-level, Camera Movement is stationary, Visual Framing is a combination of close-up shot and over-the-shoulder shot, or more precisely, over the shoulders of Sister Mary Eucharist. Under AUDITORY MODE: Soundtrack, Music, Song are absent, Speech / Narration is House saying to Sister Mary Eucharist, “Do you people keep records of these things? Is there a ‘Cathlympics’?”


Figure 9. Visual and auditory transcription

Figure 10 Somatic and creativity transcription

Under SOMATIC MODE: Kinesics, Kinesic Actions: Physical Movement in Space for both House and Sister Mary Eucharist are stationary and Gesture is absent; Kinesic Expression/Display: Facial Expression is only visible for House, as he raises his eyebrows and offers a big-eye stare at Sister Mary Eucharist; the frame shows the two participants seating down and the use of framing within personal space, hence the values in Kinesic Orientation: Proxemics and Stance, Posture. In terms of CREATIVITY, Instance is ‘cathlympics’ belonging to the pattern-reforming category, Nature is portmanteau – a combination of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Olympics’, and the Participant in this instance of creativity production is House. Sister Mary Eucharist has not participated in the generating of the portmanteau and therefore is not considered as a participant in this creativity production. Multimodal transcription was performed on every instance yielded from the extraction process and was then analysed in the following section. Quantifying pattern-reforming creativity


Figure 11 Instances of creative items multimodally transcribed

Multimodal analysis of the multimodal transcription of pattern-reforming creativity can be performed in various ways with the help of Microsoft Excel. From the data shown in Error! Reference source not found., cells of same attribute is grouped to yield frequency counts. Using stock chart as the charting type, it is easy to create a scattered graph showing the distribution of all instances of pattern-reforming creativity in unit time across the entire series. As the duration of their appearances are miniscule relative to the entire episode, each instance will appear as dots in the graph. Depending on the requirement, the number of pattern-reforming creativity instances can be calculated in terms of per episode, per season or in units of their multiples. After a simple calculation of 5th, 25th, 50th, 75th, 95th percentile using Microsoft Excel’s default formula =PERCENTILE.EXC(ARRAY, k), which makes little difference with formula =PERCENTILE.INC(ARRAY, k) or even formula =PERCENTILE(ARRAY, k) in earlier versions of Microsoft Excel in this case, their percentile lines are added to the graph as shown in Error! Reference source not found.:


Figure 12 Distribution of pattern-reforming creativity across entire series of House M.D.

Adding a trendline to Error! Reference source not found., an increasing trend of patternreforming creativity from season 1 to season 8 can be seen. The actual distribution of patternreforming creativity instances per season in shown in Error! Reference source not found.: Table 1 Counts of instances of pattern-reforming creativity

Although the scattering of the pattern-reforming creativity shown in Error! Reference source not found. seems random and it is reasonable for pattern-reforming creativity to appear randomly due to its unexpectedness and breaking of rules in nature, when considering the distribution of pattern-reforming creativity as a series, the data does show a rather well-balanced normal distribution


(with the median slightly shifted to the right) for such small sample size of 128. The most densely distributed period of pattern-reforming creativity is between 00:18:34 and 00:26:15 (50th – 75th percentile) with 33 instances, followed closely by the 30 instances between 00:07:15 and 00:18:33 (25th – 50th percentile). Frequencies fall between 0:26:16 and 0:40:52 as well as 0:03:39 and 0:07:14 to 26 and 25 instances respectively before falling significantly to 7 instances between 0:00:00 and 0:03:38 as well as 0:40:53 and episode endings. Per season-wise, 7 seasons out of 8 have the total occurrence of pattern-reforming creativity per season between 14 and 21, with the exception of season one having the lowest at 6.

Figure 13 Number of pattern-reforming creativity per episode across entire series of House M.D.

With 43 episodes having one count, 25 having two counts, 9 having three counts, and 1 having four counts, the number of pattern-reforming creativity per episode across the entire series as shown in the bar chart in Error! Reference source not found. unveils a general increasing trend in the frequency of use, from above 1 to near 2 instances.


Figure 14 Pivot table of facial expression VS visual framing

Using pivot table, multiple semiotic resources can be cross-tabulated quickly for easy visualization and data-mining. Error! Reference source not found. shows an example of a pivot table of Facial Expressions versus Visual Framing. It summarizes the appearances, in frequency counts, in fractions or in this case in percentages, of all 32 combinations of facial expressions performed by the actors with respect to 11 combinations of visual framing techniques used in 177 episodes of House M.D. in 128 instances of pattern-reforming creativity production.

Figure 15 Pivot tables of character’s pattern-reforming creativity contribution counts

The pivot tables in Error! Reference source not found. show strong association with facial expressions realized interpersonally by four types of visual framing: close-up (40.63%), close-up over-the-shoulder (13.28%), medium (17.97%) and medium over-the-shoulder (12.50%),


predominantly captured stationarily (69.54%) at eye-level (89.06%) in personal space (63.33%) or social space (27.5%). Meaning is conveyed textually through the use of portmanteau (26.56%) and are contributed mostly by the protagonist Dr. Gregory House (73.02%).

Conclusion This study has shed light on the relationship between pattern-reforming creativity and telecinematic performances of one of the world’s most popular TV drama. As the analysis of House M.D. suggests, the series have shown consistency in its use of pattern-reforming creativity in each episode across most seasons, and in its adaption of cinematographic and kinesic elements as well as the use of neologism and portmanteau in portraying the central character Dr. Gregory House. Since actors’ performances bear close resemblance to the actual human behaviour in reality (Bednarek 2010), the findings in this study could be a useful reference to creative language use in spoken American English in the real world. This study covers only several creative linguistic forms, namely neologism, portmanteaus and slang of pattern-reforming creativity. These forms are relatively more lexicogrammatically distinguishable and are thus translatable into computer-recognisable extraction criteria for WordSmith Tools. However, computer-extractable creative linguistic forms are not limited to the ones covered in this study and are opened to possibilities of future research. The multimodal discourse analysis demonstrated in this study aims to showcase a number of simple yet powerful methods using basic tools available on Microsoft Excel. It is hope that future researchers of multimodality will see benefits in the use of ubiquitous spreadsheet tools and not be deterred by the lack of computer programming knowledge. Future research on the pattern-forming creativity, the pattern-reforming counterpart, will provide a fuller picture into the interactions between creative language production, telecinematic performance and telecinematography.

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