'What do you wish someone had told you - Paris île de France'

Seite 1

Introduction

This text is taken from the Paris forum on Trip Advisor, a message board where individuals can plan trips, place reviews and contribute to message board posts. This is a selection from a post on 'what do you wish someone had told you - Paris île de France'.

Mode

multimodal - written online response with features of spoken language e.g 'lol'

informal, modern lexis e.g. 'wow'

poor grammar e.g. speech marks incorrectly used

unplanned and spontaneous (evident from grammatical and spelling errors, and the lack of structure

Audience

people going to Paris

presumably adults who have never been to Paris

Genre

online response to a forum question

lack of structure, grammatical errors as uninspected

imperative verbs used - 'try the stinky cheeses', typical feature of advisory texts

Context of production and reception

created to give forum poster advice and tips about going to Paris e.g. recommendation of museum passes

perhaps written on a phone, to account for inaccurate typing

comical reception; makes people laugh e.g. 'have you sign a clipboard or give you a ring... lol'

Simple adjectives

'little'

'cold'

'rude'

'warm'

'wonderful'

'stinky'

feature of regular, conversational lexical choices

shows lack of forethought and amateurism of writer - not a professional

Informal language

Second person direct address personal pronoun 'you' used to address the reader - conversational

'Wow' being used as an exclamatory sentence

'handy' - informal, colloquial and chatty term

'lol' - abbreviations are not common in formal language

contractions used, also uncommon in formal language

Grammatical and spelling mistakes

spelling of 'museum' and 'probably'

punctuation errors; double commas, unnecessary spacing

confusion of 'its' and 'it's'

shows text as spontaneous and written by an amateur author

Seite 2

Representation of Paris and Parisians

The author is giving advice from their own experiences - 1st person protagonist

Written as a personal narrative; used Trip Advisor before, refers to spatial deixis of 'here', taken a trip to Paris themselves - seems reliable

Honest account; relies only on their POV; evaluative - 'worth the metro trip out'

modal verbs used - 'may' shows possibility

evaluative adjectives - 'tastiest', shows opinion

doesn't follow Labov's six stages of story telling, but the elements are there