Hayley's 21st Birthday Language Analysis

Mother and daughter relationships can be very complicated. It seems like the older your daughter gets, the larger the distance between mother and daughter grow. This gap may lead to tension, arguing, or just a feeling of uneasiness between both persons. It may be the age gap, the change in generation, or simply some unknown factor. Some mothers try to bridge the gap and gain a closer relationship with their daughters when they reach adulthood. It isn’t written in stop when adulthood comes, but in the scene analyzed from “Modern Family: Hayley’s 21st Birthday,” this age seems to be 21. In the scene, the mother, Claire, wants to create a bond with her daughter Hayley on her 21st birthday. The setting does not seem like the most appropriate, as it is in a bar, but Claire makes the attempt …show more content…
In lecture, we learned that the use of powerless language lowers impression of competence, trustworthiness, dynamism, social class, and message effectiveness (lecture 1/20/15). It is possible that Claire chose to use powerless language because she sees Hayley’s age group as low competent or low in dynamism. One specificity of powerless language is its use of tag questions. Tag questions are a sign of hesitancy or uncertainty associated with feminine speech; tag questions can get your conversational partner to agree with you, establishing a connection based on similar opinions. It can be assumed that Claire used this language tactic because both her and Hayley are women, and she wanted to show her daughter that they have common interests. In the scene when Hayley opens her gift, a pair of shoes, Claire automatically takes them and says, “These are cute, right?” By doing so, Claire wants to continue the causality of the conversation, but sticking to the agenda, the agenda being to create a relationship with her adult daughter