Information flow in TV series : a textual approach

In the past decades, linguistics has greatly profited not only from research and advances in other fields of knowledge such as sociology and anthropology, but also from other disciplines less closely related to it. This may be a good opportunity to use linguistic tools and conceptions for the analysis of not exclusively verbal products. Therefore, this article defends a model which, from a systemic functional perspective, gives account of the internal organization of TV series and advances explanations for some of their most common traits. Special attention is paid to Information flow, providing a description of how the given and the new parts of any episode fit together, with much more emphasis on the former than on the latter Also, the different segments that make up an average episode are analysed and their respective textual and informative functions established. Likewise, the process of comprehension deserves incidental commentaries mainly focused on the deceptive ease with which we receive TV series.