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The Motive ‘Whydunit’ Television Hybrid

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Abstract

The word ‘serial’, used as an adjective (mostly related to verbs and amid the array of other possible occurrence contexts), refers to what is “used in sequence to form a construction”. As a noun associated with media discourse, it defines “a story or a play appearing in regular instalments on television or radio or in a magazine” (ibid.). Subsequently, the development of a single and consolidated behaviour or pattern is in slight contrast with the ‘series’ signification as “[several] events, objects or people of a similar or related kind coming one after another”. By this last definition, serial events correspond to the cause–effect scheme of a single story. A series of facts—although the possibility of being as much consequential—is not necessarily related to a unique pattern but a similar format. Such differentiation reflects a diverse narrative rendition on a television context, which associates the series muster of stand-alone episodes with a serial concatenate collection of instalments sharing the same silver thread to making a cinematic multi editor project (MEP).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    ‘Serial’. The Oxford Living Dictionaries [online resource]. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/serial (accessed Jan. 24, 2019).

  2. 2.

    ‘Series’. Ibid. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/series (accessed Jan. 24, 2019).

  3. 3.

    Vancouver Economic Commission. ‘Film and television production’. https://www.vancouvereconomic.com/film-television/ (accessed May 9, 2019).

  4. 4.

    Multimodally intended as a blend of linguistic and extra-linguistic features consisting of visual salience, soundtrack/ambient noises, cinematic techniques, and merely verbal aspects.

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Gentile, F.P. (2021). The Motive ‘Whydunit’ Television Hybrid. In: Corpora, Corpses and Corps. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78276-4_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78276-4_5

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