Speech Events - take 1, action!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqwgeZooUmQ

I hope you find the video interesting. Now let's get down to the business - disecting the components of this speech event.

1. Genre: romance
2. Topic: opening up about oneself
3. Purpose: finding a partner/love
4. Setting: a metro in a French city
5. Key: serious yet casual
6. Participants: the actor, the poor lady, and the other passengers
7. Message form: spoken French, facial expressions
8. Act sequence: greetings; purpose of act; self introduction; appeal
9. Rules for interaction: be sincere, open, and earnest
10. Norms of interpretation: adhering to the rules for interaction signifies seriousness and honesty in the action

However, the twist is that the guy's actually an actor doing a sketch for money, and that he didn't mean what he said.

Here, we can see that even though we don't commit ourselves 100% in what we do (what we do can be totally staged), once we are involved in a particular speech event, most of the time we still follow the governing rules of the speech event. Think about attending a lecture whose lesturer we hate the most - taking down notes, answering questions when asked, etc still happen as usual like with any other lecturers.

Hhhmmm.. When thinking about how I should close this post, one thing crossed my mind.

Different cultures may carry out one speech event differently in the same setting. We have to be aware of it and adopt it consciously in order to adapt to and do well in our environment.
It's just like different aspiring actors can interpret and act out one single script differently during an audition. And the most fitting one lands the job.