Identifying the features of different kinds of speech is the first step in understanding spoken language. The second is hearing how speech changes to fit different contexts. These can be different places (such as the playground, a doctor’s surgery, a law court or a job interview) and different audiences (eg adults, friends, potential employers).
Key to each context is purpose – why we are having the conversation in the first place. Are we sharing gossip with friends in order to bond more tightly with our social group? Or boasting of some achievement in order to raise our status within that group? Are we giving or asking for important information? Are we persuading someone we are trustworthy so they will give us a job?
Changing the way we speak is an important way of building bridges in different social situations. Not responding to new contexts or people can cause problems. In the hands of comedians that means laughter.
Again, the humour comes from a number of sources. Firstly, because we don’t expect anyone to be so rude. Especially when that person is running a hotel where the manager’s job to be nice, polite and welcoming to guests.
Secondly, the only change in the way Fawlty speaks to the guest and the person on the phone is in degrees of rudeness. He orders the guest around without looking at him (“Yes? Your name… There, there… Both names please…”) and is heavily sarcastic to the builder on the phone (note his comment about cementing the bricks together “in the traditional fashion”).
The Essay on Basic Theories To The Conceptualizations Of Job Analysis Accuracy
There are two basic theory to the conceptualizations of job analysis accuracy:- Classical Test Theory and Generalizability Theory. Classical test theory suggests that a “true score” esists for a given job and that true scores are stavle over time. Any measurement variation error are eliminated or aggragated across time or sources. Through this, researchers have commonly aggregated job ...
Thirdly, the way he behaves does not change according to outside influences – until the guest mentions his name: Lord Melbury. We see Fawlty’s incredible snobbery in action as he thinks he finally has a member of the British upper class staying at his hotel.
The first laugh comes from the way he dismisses O’Reilly on the phone – a pause then a simple “Go away!”. Short, rude and so different from the standard language routines people traditionally employ at the end of phone calls (where verbal politeness is very important because we cannot, of course, use body language to deepen the meaning of our words).
The second laugh comes from the change in Fawlty’s tone and manner. He starts to apologise, smiles and even starts to bow. He sees Lord Melbury as his socially superior and the embodiment of everything he likes about traditional Britain. Later in the episode Fawlty pays heavily for his simple, snap judgements about people!
This clip offers a vital truth about social language. We all change the way we speak depending on who we are talking to – but here we laugh at someone making those changes for reasons we are encouraged to see as wrong and ridiculous. The working class builder, who claims he has the flu, is rudely dismissed. The man claiming to be a Lord immediately has Fawlty’s attention. And which of the two people, O’Reilly or Melbury, do you think was telling the truth?
