Umeå University's logo

umu.sePublications
Change search
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf
Subverting motion in science fiction?: Beam in the Star Trek TV series
Umeå University, Faculty of Arts, Department of language studies.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-6323-2672
2023 (English)In: Linguistics Vanguard, E-ISSN 2199-174X, Vol. 9, no s3, p. 287-295Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Characters in science fiction TV have to move through the universe at the speed which the plot necessitates. In Star Trek, characters can beam from one location to another in an instant. In the visual modality, there is no continuous path of motion between the source and the goal, which would technically disqualify beam from most linguistic definitions of motion. This study aims to map out the usage patterns of beam and investigate whether or not it is linguistically construed as motion within the show. The study is based on a section of the TV Corpus (Davies, Mark. 2019. The TV Corpus. https://www.english-corpora.org/tv/ (accessed 28 May 2022)) consisting of all available episodes of all Star Trek TV series between 1966 and 2005 and uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. The study found that beam is indeed used as a motion verb within the series. Its usage is also quite varied, denoting motion of many different figures in many different directions. The fact that we conceive of beaming as motion even though there is no continuous path might be partly explained by the etymology of beam, and partly by the embodied nature of language. Our current register makes it is hard to imagine transportation without movement.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Mouton de Gruyter, 2023. Vol. 9, no s3, p. 287-295
Keywords [en]
corpus linguistics, motion, construal, embodiment, Star Trek
National Category
General Language Studies and Linguistics Specific Languages
Research subject
Linguistics; language studies; English
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-215978DOI: 10.1515/lingvan-2022-0160ISI: 001084448400001Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85174355510OAI: oai:DiVA.org:umu-215978DiVA, id: diva2:1808089
Available from: 2023-10-30 Created: 2023-10-30 Last updated: 2024-10-12Bibliographically approved

Open Access in DiVA

fulltext(317 kB)47 downloads
File information
File name FULLTEXT01.pdfFile size 317 kBChecksum SHA-512
3c85ae8b9c09d1d1d7d9553163c81ab56c0b3ab773fdcf0800582c79d691189d22f7ce0ac6e718787e663543ffbe7389175c60328cbad5125480078da3b1b51b
Type fulltextMimetype application/pdf

Other links

Publisher's full textScopus

Authority records

Törmä, Kajsa

Search in DiVA

By author/editor
Törmä, Kajsa
By organisation
Department of language studies
In the same journal
Linguistics Vanguard
General Language Studies and LinguisticsSpecific Languages

Search outside of DiVA

GoogleGoogle Scholar
Total: 47 downloads
The number of downloads is the sum of all downloads of full texts. It may include eg previous versions that are now no longer available

doi
urn-nbn

Altmetric score

doi
urn-nbn
Total: 358 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf