期刊文章分类查询,尽在期刊图书馆西安外国语大学大学 英文学院
Sociolinguistic Analysis of My Fair Lady
Abstract:This paper told the story about how a poor flower girl became an upper class lady. Through the comparative analysis of the characters in the play, the use of words and the intonation, the author intend to analysis the article from the perspective of social linguistics, focusing on variations of language caused by gender difference, class difference and so on. I hope to help readers better understand the film, it also express that the importance of language as a social identity of a person and the influence a language exerts on a person’s experience.
Key words: sociolinguistic; gender differences; class differences; regional differences
1. Introduction
Social linguistics study the relationship between society and language by analyzing the language. The story is about that a poor flower girl named Eliza how to become a class of lady. The linguist professor Higgins made a bet with his friend in the film, he will train the flower girl as a upper class socialite within 6 months simply by teaching her standard English. This paper tries to analyze the movie from a sociolinguistic angle mainly focusing on language difference caused by social class and gender difference．
2. Regional Dialect
As we all know that all the language have their others forms, we can say that Every language may have varieties. Dialect is defined as one of the varieties of language which is believed to be excluded from polite society.
2.1 Regional Dialect
Regional dialects just as its name implies, that is to say they speak different languages in different regions. In this film, the linguists live in the city of London, but Eliza lives in the poor area. Because of the differences between the two people, the most significant difference between the two languages is reflected in the pronunciation. Linguists speak standard English, but she has a strong dialect characteristics. She pronounces “A, E, I, O, U” as Ahyee, e, Iyee, ow, you.” Therefore, it is not hard to see that people who live in different regions of the same country may also have different ways of pronunciation.
2.2 Gender Dialect
Variation in language use is also associated with the sex of individual speakers. Some general linguistic differences can be observed in the speeches of male and female individuals. In the movie, linguists mercilessly interrupted her “Oh, shut up, shut up.” Compared with Eliza - tone, which reflects as male linguists in the session the absolute dominant position. The superiority of linguists and the formation of a very sharp contrast Eliza. He call her “you girl Eliza,” “silly ,” “prisoner of gutters,” and Eliza called him “gentle man,” which also shows the influence of gender on language.
2.3 Class Dialect
Social-class dialect, or sociolect, refers to the linguistic variety characteristic of a particular class. Two people who were brought up in the same geographical region and speak the same regional dialect may speak differently because of a number of social factors. Eliza begins to learn speaking standard English from Professor Higgins．Most of the time she learns how to standard lower —class pronunciation of vowels／seau／and／sei／to／ei／and au／, and learn to pronounce／h／which was omitted in her previous speaking. Besides，she has to learn to put the tone at a proper position of a sentence. For example, she should say “how kind of you to let me come” with the stress on the second word “kind” instead of on “you.” Here is a strong trace of imitation in her speaking but she does well.
3. Conclusion
In this paper, the movie My Fair Lady is discussed from the sociolinguistic view. Containing a large amount of phenomena which sociolinguists may find interesting, the movie is not only a good story to appreciate but also a proper material worth sociolinguistic attention．It has reflected the different usage of language among classes and between genders, and has demonstrated to use in a dramatic way how great the influence of language can be to a person’s experience. The film also made the Chinese audience understand the living conditions of the United Kingdom, it is good for better learning language .
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论文作者:李素霞
论文发表刊物:《语言文字学》2017年1月
论文发表时间:2017/5/3
标签：语言学论文; 社会论文; 信阳论文; 期刊论文; 探析论文; 窈窕淑女论文; 英文论文; 《语言文字学》2017年1月论文;