Jennifer Lawrence Post

What is the purpose of this text?

The purpose of this text is to describe how men and women get treated in the work industry. Jennifer is very passionate about what she says because she wants to put forward her true points of view. This finally let's her fans and the readers of this text be informed about her real feelings. She thinks that men get treated better than women in the work industry because they get better pay which is true. This shows that her view on the difference in pay between men and women is unfair, this lets us as a understand her point of view and realize about the real world of work.

The 'male' language features in this text

The fact that Jennifer uses a lot of swearing such as "asshole" and "d**ks" shows the determination and anger she has while talking about the subject. This is effective and it reviles her anger and honesty about what she is talking about, this makes us as a reader think about how passionate she must be about what she is complaining. This is a very manly language feature as stereo typically males swear more, which means they are more brutal than women. This shows that she is trying to express her feelings and thoughts using features that men usually use to show her irritation.

The 'female' language features in this text

Obviously Jennifer is a female and she uses many features to show that in her language. One of them is to described how she spoke to someone "no aggression, just blunt", this shows the more subtle and calm side of her, which lets us as a reader understand her because even though she is angry she doesn't want to show it too much, all she wanted to do is just express her opinion. 

Opinion on Online teen speak article


In this article there are many words to describe teenager slang. However not all of them are actually correct. We as teens do use a lot of those words but some of the are over exaggerated. For example the word GNOC - get naked on camera is definitely something I never used or heard anyone else use it before. However some of the language such as 'on fleek' has definitely been used by me and others around me. it is still used many times now.

Teenagers are unable to communicate effectively with adults

Teenagers are unable to communicate effectively with adults




Teenagers are able to communicate with adults even though they may speak in a different way. This shows my opinion on others who think opposite. Many people nowadays think teens use too much slang which leads to incorrect grammar and pronunciation. This might be true but that doesn't mean we cannot communicate properly with adults. From this article http://parentinfo.org/article/online-teen-speak-updated we get the impression that teens use too much coding for words for adults to not understand. I disagree with this article because not everyone uses this. However if they do many adults probably can understand the slang. this shows that teenagers use slang just because it is easier, but that doesn't mean we cannot speak with adults properly.

Community Apprentice Poster Analysis

Community apprentice poster


G- Poster
R- Formal
A- Students
M- Multi-modal
P- To inform/advise
S- Helping the community


We chose this poster because it consists of many features including synthetic personalisation. We can see this through words such as 'you'. This shows that the poster is trying to engage with the audience as it is aiming the poster at a wider audience. Rhetorical question features show that the author wants to make the reader think whether the poster actually applies to them. Also the fact that they use direct address shows that they are trying to build a relationship with the audience. We can see evidence of this in the phrase "Have you got what it takes?" This helps the reader understand whether they should or shouldn't apply because of their current situation.


The genre of this text is a poster and because it has texts and images within it means that it is multi-modal. This is a important feature as it lets the audience be more interested in the text. It also gives information and advice about helping the community which is aimed at students as in is set in St Brendan's.

William Labov

William Labov

William Labov was an American social linguistic, this means he looked at social variables which affected language use. He also is a professor at Pennsylvania University. He was interested in the fact of how social class affected language usage.

Martha’s Vineyard

The theory’s Labov looked at was firstly Martha’s Vineyard. It was a popular tourist location which was an island off east coast of America, near New York. In the summer it was mainly tourists there whereas throughout the year it was islanders, Labov wanted to see how that affected language. He named the people that went there on holiday "The summer people" and their status was between middle and upper class. The local population was the "islanders" who were working class. The island had two different parts the “Down- island" and the "Up- island". The down island was where the people live or tourists go, whereas the up island was the location of the fishing men who were working class. The thing about the "fishermen was that they were desired by the islanders because they were valued for the hard work and old fashion ways to help out.

However Labov noticed that the fishermen had their own pronunciation, because they spoke in a non-standard way. Their vowel sounds were more different especially the Diphthongs. Diphthongs are two vowel sounds combined to make their own sound. For example the word "oil" would be an "oy" sound. This comes from a Greek word which means having two sounds.

Findings

Now the founding he found was that young islanders were making a deliberate shift to using the old-style pronunciation. So therefore his ideas were that they have their own identity which differentiates from the summer people. This is a deliberate use of divergence. This makes them distance themselves from the summer people which mean they use their language to represent their identity.

Department store study

Next is the department store study (1996). This was in Manhattan New York. Within this theory Labov was testing the patterns of language usage and their link to prestige and social class. There were three stores that he experimented on which were Sacks 5th avenue, Macys and Klein’s. Sacks were the highest in social class, there was a link between prestige and language. The staff changed their language in order to fit the soundings and standards of the store. Macys is trying to be as prestige as sacks but it’s not quite there. So Labov wanted to test something called the social satisfaction of the post-vocalic r. This was the final r sound in certain words such as beer or guard. In order for him to test this out within stores he used the word fourth. He asked a question designed to receive the answer "fourth floor" or similar (methodology). He then pretended not to hear the response so that they repeat their answer. He did this because the first time someone answers could be spontaneous whereas the second time they get more time to process the correct answer which means they could use their language in a different way.

This means that the r was stratified by class which means that it was spaced out. The high socioeconomic status pronounces the 'r' more frequently than those with lower socioeconomic status. His result were that 62% of people in Sacks pronounced the post-vocalic are, 51% in Macy’s and only 20% in Klein’s. This shows his idea were correct however there were questions that contradicted his findings.

There were problems and concerns towards his theory.  How could Labov possibly know the socioeconomic status of someone just by asking them where the “fourth floor” was? This challenged his theory because certain people say things in different ways it could be from things like their accent or from where they are. This meant that his results could be biased.

Why is he important?

He is an important role for us because he is part of the linguistics department in Pennsylvania University. He has been described as “An enormously original and influential figure that has created much of the methodology” The important thing he discussed was language narrative. Labov with Joshua Waletzky took a social linguistic approach to examine how language works between people. His purpose was to “isolate the elements of narrative”, this piece of work focussed exclusively on oral narratives.  He described it as having two functions, they were referential and evaluative. The referential functions were to align something in place within a story of its contextual world by referencing events in sequential order as they originally occurred. The evaluative function was describing the storytellers’ purpose in telling its story. Then he divided narrative into six sections, these were; abstract which gives an overview of a story. Then there was orientation which serves to orient the listen in respect to the person, place, time and behaviour situation. Next was complication, this was the main story during which the narrative unfolds. Evaluation was after, it was where the author evinces self-awareness, giving explicit or implicit purpose to the retelling of the story. This was followed by resolution, this was something that occurs sequentially, it may give the story a sense of completion. Finally coda, coda was where the listener returns to present drawing them back out of the world of the story into the world of the story telling event. However some narratives do not have a coda so it is not always essential. 

The geordie acccent

First of all the Geordie accent is completely opposite to received punctuation. For example speakers do not pronounce the Rs unless it is followed by a vowel sound in that same phrase. However the Geordie accent is dying out as old tradition fade. According to BBC The main reason for the loss of old words is that "Geordies aren't geographically isolated any more. Today's Geordies are more likely to spend their weekends on cheap breaks to Barcelona and Budapest than at the beach at Redcar or Whitley Bay on their doorstep."


The Geordies not only pronounce English words in their own way but they also have completely different versions of many standard English words like "our" pronounced "wor" and words like "yous" for "you". Even though the Geordie dialect may still be alive, it's changing as more of us become part of the global village. In addition to this, they love to overuse the word “like” but a Geordie would stick it on the end of a sentence, not in the middle like others do. Also they use the word “me” a lot which is used where the speaker likes to emphasize a personal viewpoint. “I was hevin nowt to dee with it, me like.” (“Personally, I was having none of it.”)


Geordies are stereotypically seen as uneducated because of how they speak, this reflects how society sees them in a negative way. Another stereotype of the Geordies is that they can have fun. I personally know this from the programme 'Geordie shore'. This is because they always go out partying and seem to claim that they are the best for drinking and getting 'smashed'. This goes back to them being uneducated because being on a program like that clearly proves that they didn't have enough qualifications to get somewhere further in life which is why they ended up in that kind of show drinking and having 'the best time of their lives.'