The stylistics of The Sopranos: 'crime talk' in an organised crime drama

This paper examines a scene from David Chase’s hugely successful television drama The Sopranos. Contemporary stylistics has been increasingly interested in the analysis of televisual and cinematic discourse, and as part of investigations of dramatic dialogue on screen has also embraced multimodal methodologies to ‘refine existing stylistic frameworks’ (Montoro, 2011:69). This paper will reflect both the growing focus of stylisticians on televisual dialogue, and the use of multimodal techniques to examine non-linguistic alongside linguistic elements of discourse. Central to the plot throughout the six seasons of The Sopranos is the use by the authorities of cooperating witnesses and surreptitious listening devices in their pursuit of Soprano gang members. This paper will extend the methodologies of Statham (2015), which applies Goffman’s (1981) participation framework to analyse the conversational role of and the linguistic strategies used by co-operators to elicit incriminating conversations with criminal targets, and the resistant tactics used by these targets in ‘crime talk’ in The Sopranos. The divergent conversational intentions of targets and co-operators will also be analysed for their adherence to Grice’s (1975) conversational maxims. This focus is extended by the analysis of visual aspects alongside the verbal features of a scene from the first series of the drama. Recent work in multimodal stylistics (McIntyre, 2008; McIntyre and Bousfield, 2011; Montoro, 2011) has demonstrated the importance of focussing on audio-visual techniques, especially the interplay between dialogue and camera shots and position, when analysing telecinematic discourse. This paper will analyse a scene between mob boss Tony Soprano and a senior associate who has become a co-operating witness, demonstrating how camera shot and position play an important role in enhancing the involvement of the viewing audience, who vicariously share the moment in which Tony realises the betrayal of his friend.