London Language

an amazing dog

 

This is a clip about a dog with advanced skills in vocabulary and pragmatics which we talked about in class this week.

Billy

 

Jodie Foster on privacy

We've often looked at Oscar acceptance speeches when looking at the complexities of communication in various kinds of media contexts. We've looked at all the famous ones you might think of (but students often don't know about) from Sacheen Littlefeather to Halle Berry (and her Razzie acceptance speech) via Sally Field (twice) Tom Hanks etc etc.

Recently, we've been looking at Jodie Foster's Golden Globes speech for a lifetime achievement award. There's lots to say about it, including the complex audience(s) she's addressing, the complex messages, the different kinds of contextual assumptions shared to varying degrees by people in those audiences, the extent to which it was a planned performance, etc. etc.

Of course, there was also lots of discussion of this. Two examples we discussed were Sam Leith's discussion of the use of rhetoric in the speech:

Sam Leith — The genius of Jodie Foster's speech

and this Huffington Post article applying ideas from speech act theory:

Huffington Post — It's OK, Jodie, saying 'I'm gay' is optional

Billy