Meryl Streep, the actress of a thousand voices (and polyphonies)

Abstract

Discourse analysis is discipline of use for culture scholars, and a complement to go beyond the syntactic, semantic, morphologic or phonologic levels to analyze language in its discursive context. An aspect of study of interest is reported speech. Meryl Streep is a renowned actress famous for her capacity to imitate accents and dialects. When she was given an award at the Golden Globe ceremony in 2017, the actress built her acceptance speech from the words (and actions) or others: a discourse analysis of her address allows us to observe the way in which the reported speech she used makes up a sense of community with her peers and denounces President Donald Trump. This study analyzes Streep’s speech on that occasion underlining the fact that the expressions that a person uses often contain layers of meaning coming from the words of others.