My Writing Portfolio Spoken Discourse Analysis | Page 4

Jimmy is the one who asks more questions and speaks less, he plays a major role because he is
the one who gets Ryan to open up and to talk more. In this interview, Jimmy predominantly asks
leading questions, such as “how is the baby?”, “is she talking?”, “are you finding yourself doing
dad-like things?” where Ryan can answer extensively and these questions often lead to personal
stories. When telling these stories, Ryan keeps using a lot of fillers, such as “um,” “like,” “uh,”
“you know” and “yeah” among others, which does make his story flow and makes it seems very
natural and unpracticed, as though he is speaking whatever pops into his head at the moment, and
clearly shows that it’s not a practiced conversation. Fillers are ubiquitous in conversations,
because the speaker, in this case Ryan, uses them in order to organize his thoughts and form
them into a coherent speech.
Despite the interview being titled as Ryan Reynolds’ Baby Calls Him Mama, there are
actually two specific topics being discussed throughout the three minute clip, the title of the
video and the songs that millennials are listening to. The topic change was a result of one of
Jimmy’s questions which went “Are you doing everything right?” in regards to fatherhood, to
which Ryan replies with “I think so, I’m like, I’ve definitely lost all cool, you know? I’m like a
dad guy now” and then he commences a personal story about himself jamming to These Dreams
by Heart, where he noticed a bus full of high school kids laughing at him. This story inspired
their next topic, which is that the songs that these high school kids listen to nowadays are
completely bland and stupid. Ryan shows anger and frustration at the high school kids who
laughed at him, by referring to them as “high school pricks … you could shove your Nay Nay
song up your asses,” to which Jimmy reacts immediately with his body language as he somehow
jumps in his seat, clearly triggered by Ryan’s vulgar word choice and yells “hey, whoa, whoa
calm down.” There is a similar situation that occurs in the beginning of the interview, where
4