Class Work Text

In Tuesday's lesson, my table and I looked at the quote by Johnny Depp:-

"If you love two people at the same time, choose the second one because if you really loved the first one, you wouldn't have fallen for the second."

After having a group discussion between the group that was on my table, we found out that through analysing the quote, the quotation uses personal pronouns, 'you', using a direct mode of address to speak to the reader specifically. It could also be argued that this quote uses Fairclough's synthetic personalisation, as it assumes that the reader knows what he is on about and also that the reader actually loves the second person more than the first. Without knowing the reader's circumstances, it assumes that the reader can relate to this quotation.

We also discussed Deborah Tannen's theory of Advice Vs Feelings, and it is significant that the quote gives advice as well as being said by a male. This fits perfectly into the category of Language and Gender roles. This specific quotation also has influential power, as it is advice that the reader can choose to take or not, however due to Johnny Depp's high status in society due to his fame, means that there is a use of instrumental power, giving him more power over the reader to listen to his quote.

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The text that we chose out of the texts we were given was the news feed from Twitter. After discussing the elements of language in this text, we decided that there was a combination of both, influential and instrumental power. The use of instrumental power is that the account that had the news feed followed celebrities, and due to their fame and popularity, it means that their higher status gives them more advantages to be followed by the account that we had a screenshot of their news feed. We also discussed that the celebrities have the power over what their followers see and consume. However there is also influential power, as the person's Twitter account has authority over who they follow, meaning that if they see any posts or tweets they do not agree with, they can either unfollow or report/block the celebrity Twitter user. 

Users on Twitter tend to write tweets that are very opinionated, meaning that it could affect the face threatening acts and politeness strategies. This is why we noticed that a lot of celebrities use "in my opinion" to reduce less offence to their followers.