With one extract of your choice, examine how the author uses aspects of real everyday talk in their dialogue.
With one extract of your choice, examine how the author uses aspects of real everyday talk in their dialogue.
This extract of Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding takes place at a party, which in the story, Bridget had been informed was a ‘Tarts and Vicars’ party. This shows that the conversation is very much public as there are a number of other people around, including the 3 people in the conversation, Bridget, her Aunt Una and Uncle Geoff. The relationship between the speakers is familial yet distant. The language used is very much formal language, despite the informal setting, portraying the upper-middle class the characters are from. This style of language, in this situation particularly, can also show unease, as Bridget has been ridiculed and it is Una’s fault. This mirrors everyday talk very well, as people often use a more formal tone when faced with a difficult situation such as this.
Una has the most turns in the extract, and also appears to have the power, as she sets the agenda at the beginning of the extract with the line ‘Bridget!! Super to see you.’ This shows immediately that they have a reasonably close relationship as she addresses Bridget by her first name. The fact that she is hosting the party also gives her power from the beginning. Bridget has only three turns in the extract, showing her embarrassment by speaking only when necessary such as when she is asked a question. ‘Where is he?’ ‘He had to work.’ This approach of a number of interrogatives re-enforces Una’s character and also means she is setting the agenda of the conversation. The declarative used by Bridget, also has some connotations around it. The force of the utterance is that her boyfriend is at work, where as the sense is that he was not present at the party. The mode of address when Una says ‘Geoffrey’ again adds to the social element of the extract, showing the class background, and Fielding is mimicking this class and the pragmatics around it through the language, particularly at the beginning of the extract where Una says ‘Have a Pimms’, as this is often seen as a very upper class drink. Una orders Geoff about, and this is typical of everyday speech, as men are often shown as being incapable of organising anything! The last question- answer pair ‘How are we going to marry you off at this rate?’ ‘At this rate I’m going to end up as a call girl,’ is effectively an incomplete adjacency pair as Bridget mutters her dialogue under her breath and does not directly address her uncle.
