Changes in the morphological structure of Walter White’s speech as a marker of the film character’s transformation in the television series “Breaking Bad”

Abstract

The study aims to identify the correlation between changes in the morphological structure of speech and the stages of Walter White’s identity transformation in the television series “Breaking Bad”. Using a corpus of the character’s utterances (50,290 tokens divided into three periods – the emergence, ascendancy, and dominance and downfall of Heisenberg), the study analyzes the frequency of personal pronouns (“I”, “you”, “we”, “me”, “us”) and proto-agentive / emotive verb constructions. The scientific novelty of the work lies in conducting the first systematic quantitative study of grammatical changes based on material from all seasons of the series and proposing an algorithm for the corpus analysis of morphological categories as objective indicators of an individual’s inner evolution. The findings demonstrate that changes in morphological indicators are statistically significantly correlated with the stages of the character’s personal transformation and reflect the non-linear nature of the internal restructuring of his linguistic personality. The peak of subjectivity – an increase in the frequency of “I” and “me” – the breakdown of collective identity – a decrease in the frequency of “we” – and an increase in the differences between the frequencies of “I” / “you” and “I” / “we” occur during Heisenberg’s ascendancy (Seasons 3-4). By contrast, the final season (Season 5) is marked by a decrease in the frequency of emotive constructions with the pronoun “I”, indicating the completion of the transformation and the suppression of self-reflection.