Kristen Wiig Research Paper

I have chosen the project option Speech Styles of the comedian Kristen Wiig. The reason I decided to pick her as my topic was because I thought it would be interesting to see how different and how similar she is in the Californian skit when compared to her everyday life. In this paper, idiolect differences, phonological differences, and non-verbal communications between Kristen Wiig’s Californians Skits from Saturday Night Live, will be discussed when compared to her interview from the show Ellen. First of all, Kristen Wiig’s idiolect differs in her everyday life from her performance in “Californians.” “Every person has a unique way of speaking, called an idiolect. The language used by a group of speakers is a dialect…the grammar differences among dialects are not as great as the similarities, thus permitting speakers of different …show more content…
When is comes to the phonetic sound [s] she tends to elongate that sound. For example, when she says her husband’s name “Stuart” it is elongated. Whereas, in the Ellen interview, the [s] sound is pronounced “normally.” For example, when she says the morpheme [sɛnt], it is short and not exaggerated. In the way vowels are pronounced, between the two, is where the major differences show. For example, when she says the morpheme “crazy” she pronounces it [krezɪ] instead of [krezi]. Once again when she says RVSP she pronounces the phoneme /p/ as [pɪ] instead or [pi]. When comparing it to her own vowel pronunciation in the Ellen interview, such as the morpheme maybe as [ˈmeɪbi]. Her character in SNL would, most likely, pronounce it [ˈmeɪbɪ], just based on the observation of past pronunciation of vowel phoneme /ɪ/. There were patterns through this part of the analysis, I notice that in the skit, she pronounced the vowel phoneme [I] as [ɪ]. I figured out that if her character were to pronounce certain morphemes that Kristen Wiig phonetically pronounces it would be quite