Mean Girls

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFLbviESZq8

The clip I choose to analyze is a monologue from the movie, Mean Girls.  It is a scene in which one of its main characters is talking about the schools “freak,” Janis Ian.  It is easy to tell that the monologue is extremely fast rate right from the start with minimal pauses.  This activity can be categorized as spontaneous speech, which is speech that tends to be discontinuous and fragmented.  Although, her speech is discontinuous, she uses a specific type of pause, filled pause.  Filled pause are vocalization like “um” and ”like” that fill pauses, covering up that there is silence. 

Expressions in her speech are also very noticeable.  For example, every time when she mentions a bad comment towards Janis Ian, the volume of her voice softens, demonstrating that is it not so “cool.”  Another example of when expression was easily heard was “oh my god, I love your skirt!” Her pitch got high and she expressed a sense of sarcasm. Once the girl responded back with “thanks. It was my moms,” a longer pause was noticed.  This defines a silent pause, which develop when stumped, emotional or reluctant to say anything.  She did not want to respond simply because she couldn’t believe the girl was even wearing a “vintage” skirt. 

A final vocalic that the girl demonstrates is breathiness.  Breathiness is an overabundance of air rushing through the vocal folds.  As previously stated her speech is very discontinuous, however when changing topics or time periods, she grasps for air.  By grasping for air, the audience is able to tell she is speaking faster than she can breathe. 

Overall I feel the girl performed the monologue with true meaning.  She used different ranges in rate, pitch, and volume to express different emotions through out the speech.  When more frustrated and disgusted with Janis the volume got louder with a few higher pitched moments.  When she was just rambling about Janis, the tone was flat and lowered.