Corpus Analysis of the Police Language in the American TV Series CSI: NY

Abstract

The field of English for Specific Purpose has continuously broadened its scope especially among the members of the expanding circle of English speaker (Kachru, 1992; 2006). This research paper examines the content of the American TV Series CSI:NY to identify the words with highest absolute frequencies keywords or the words with highest relative frequencies (e,g, Scott, 1997, 2000), and N-grams or combination of words (e.g. Bednarek, 2011) used by police officers in the TV series while doing their jobs. Relative frequencies were obtained by comparing the data against the British National Corpus (BNC) and computing their log-likelihood values, and the N-grams were identified from the concordance of each keyword using the software Antconc (Anthony, 2017). The keywords and n-grams were then iteratively categorized into themes and compared against the actual functions of police officers. With a high cut-off log-likelihood value of 100.00, the findings showed 71 keywords divided into four categories: (1) informal spoken language use (N=26, 36.62%) (2) addressing oneself, other people or things (N=24, 33.80%), (3) crime scenes (N=16, 22.54%), and (4) interviewing suspects, witnesses, or other persons (N=5, 7.04%). Pedagogically, the findings have strong implications since the words with the highest absolute frequencies, and the n-gram are indispensable in preparing ESP (listening and speaking) courses for police students and officers who are members of the expanding circle of English speakers (Kachru, 2006).