Emma Watson Speech

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UN’s Women Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson delivered a formal speech at United Nations Headquarters, New York on the 20th of September 2014. Watson’s speech, in a formal tone regarded the launch of the human equality campaign ‘HeForShe’ targeting the audience of UN member state representatives present. Additionally the speech was recorded and broadcasted on video streaming platforms such as YouTube where the audience extends to all people across the globe. The surrounding context, being a UN summit facilitates the formal register expected. The renowned actor’s purpose is the promotion of the HeForShe campaign as well as to raise awareness towards the ethical issue of gender inequality. Watson’s use of lexis reflects the formality and purpose of the speech. Lexemes pertaining to the lexical field of politics, (being a UN summit) for example “campaign” (line 4), “economic” (line 11) and “feminism” (line 10) allow Watson to express her expertise. This exemplified expertise leads to credibility and formality, thus supporting the function of the text. Furthermore the employment of nouns such as “feminism” (line 7), “woman” (line 23) and “daughter” (line 30), which all are hyponyms of the female sex or even “young men” (line 47) and “sons” (line 61) which belong to the semantic field of the male sex create cohesion for listeners. In doing so, Watson has targeted every age and form of gender specifically implying that they all are affected by gender inequality. The varied use of different nouns – especially ‘son’ and ‘daughter’ to describe the gender inequality add a sense of vulnerability and innocence where, the audience is expected to uphold morals and act upon the issue. The stylistic feature of morphological patterning is employed throughout the speech. Nominalisation, the process in which the use of a verb, adjective or an adverb is transformed into a noun is
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