Lecture 3: Speech Events

I have finally finished linking everyone’s blogs on IVLE! Phew~! For those I missed out or have mis-spelt your names, kindly drop me a comment and let me know J

Well, today’s lesson on speech event is really interesting. It reflects individual cultural values and allows us to look into the various aspects of an event. I thought an analysis of a speech event will be really hard and exhaustive. The 10 components of the analysis of the speech event really look daunting at first. But after breaking them up, it becomes quite an easy task to analysis a speech event. Below is an example:

Genre: Invitation
Topic: Attending a wedding J
Purpose or Function: Inviting a friend to a wedding
Setting: Anywhere (Office, restaurants or personally arriving at the friend’s house)
Key: Formal and joyous tone
Participants: The one getting married (Bride or bridegroom) and the one being invited to attend the wedding
Message Form: Speech or written with gestures like handshakes
Act Sequence:

Bride: Offer an invitation
Friend: Response to offer
Bride: Offer gratitude in attending

Bride: Hi, I would like to invite you to my wedding. Its on the 10^th of September, next month. (Handing over the invitation card)
Friend: Hey, congratulations! (Perform handshake as a gesture of congratulating the bride) I will definitely be there.
Bride: Thank you. Do be there early.

Rules for Interaction: Both parties should show joy in the conversation since it is a joyous event.
Norms of Interpretation: I guess expressing congratulations are pretty common in wedding invitations as it is sort of a basic courtesy to congratulate the former for getting married. In the same way, it is also a Chinese tradition to extend wedding invitation in a wedding invitation card and not just a verbal invitation.

I feel that in the analysis of speech events, the most difficult or contradicting part might be the message form on kinesics. Most of the time, when people do not meant what they say; their tone of the voice might change. Most importantly, we can observe from their certain gestures that they might mean otherwise. For example in the scenario below,

Joyous Boy: Daddy, this is the results from my maths test (Handing over test papers)
Solemn Father: Hmph (Raising eyebrow and nodding), only 90 marks? What about the other 10 marks? Careless mistakes?
Disappointed Boy: Yes. (Looking down on the ground)

In this case, the father might not want the little boy to be complacent over his high marks and might say something like that to make the little boy wants to work harder. But in fact, the father is happy about the results at the same time. Thus, sometimes, we can get more clarity of the complexness of human’s emotions through their non-verbal acts.