‘ Lost ’ for words? Proposing a conversation segment analysis approach to scripted intercultural telecinematic dialogue

This study argues that scripted telecinematic dialogue can contribute meaningfully to intercultural pragmatic research by offering a reflexive representation of culturally grounded communicative norms. Such data let us examine how core interactional mechanisms and conversation-analysis-specific practices such as turn-taking, repair, and alignment are modeled, stylized, and rendered intelligible. Focusing on scripted intercultural interactions in the US American TV series Lost (2004–2010), we analyze how communicative encounters are scriptedly constructed as (un)successful and (in)efficient in interactions between three characters: a Korean native speaker, a US–Mexican Spanish bilingual, and an African–American monolingual. Using conversation segment analysis, we examine pragmatic strategies in segments of scripted intercultural communication. Our analysis of utterances, turns, and topic negotiation shows how creators, scriptwriters, and actors shape dialogue into a form of verisimilitude , balancing television’s formal constraints with interactions that remain plausible to viewers. On a larger scale, our study addresses broader questions about the applicability of pragmatic principles to mediated discourse and fiction’s role in shaping intercultural expectations and advances a cross-disciplinary perspective on the pragmatics of fiction by examining scripted dialogue in intercultural encounters. In doing so, we explore the relationship between representation, normativity, and pragmatic competence, showing how fictional interactions may both reflect prior assumptions and shape viewers’ perceptions of intercultural communication. In this way, this study contributes to expanding pragmatic theory by demonstrating how telecinematic dialogue can serve as a site for negotiating and representing pragmatic competence.