Formulaic language in TV series: an analysis of the use of lexical bundles in the American sitcom "How I Met Your Mother"

This thesis aims to explore the concept of formulaic language and, in particular, of the lexical bundles analysed in the American sitcom "How I Met Your Mother". More precisely, this paper is divided into two main parts: the first part provides the theoretical background of formulaic language, lexical bundles, and authentic spoken language in TV series (Chapters 1 and 2); the second part presents the practical and personal analysis of some of these fixed linguistic sequences found in the corpora chosen (Chapter 3). In fact, what I will do is analyse the frequency of lexical bundles in two specific corpora: the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, representative of authentic language, and the “HIMYM Corpus”, representative of scripted language of fiction. In the end, this corpus-based study aims to prove the similarity of the lexical bundles found in spoken American english and the ones that appeared in the TV series "How I Met Your Mother".