When Literary Prose Meets Television : Comparing the vocabulary of A Song of Ice and Fire to Game of Thrones

Sammanfattning: This paper compares the vocabulary used in the first seven episodes of Game of Thrones by television network HBO, to its source material, the 1996 novel A Game of Thrones. In particular, three questions were investigated; which medium uses the most frequent vocabulary, which medium makes most use of older words, and what do these findings imply with regards English language learning. A total of 20 words and phrases from each medium were compared. In order to answer these questions, the Corpus of Contemporary American English was used to list the number of times a word or phrase is uttered in the English language, and Google Ngram Viewer was used to track their historical frequency. The Oxford English Dictionary was used to list a word’s first recorded use in English. The findings show a resounding tendency for the TV series to use vocabulary that is more frequent in modern English, while the novel made use of less frequent synonyms. The age of the words showed more varied results, with no substantial difference between the two media. A further aim was to complement previous research involving language learning through literature by demonstrating what particular words are being learned. It also seeks to give a blueprint for future research that aims to delve into the vocabulary of literature and television, and analyse the linguistic trends of these two media.