《卖花女》的语言变体研究_英语论文

A Study of Language Variation in Pygmalion

摘要

《卖花女》是爱尔兰著名剧作家萧伯纳的代表作之一。它讲述了卖花女伊莉莎在语言学家息金斯的指导下学习更为标准的英语，最终成功跻身上流社会的故事。本文从社会语言学角度，在社会语言学相关理论的指导下，对该著作进行分析解读。一方面，本文对剧中人物语言进行整理分析，解读文中的语言变体现象。另一方面，本文试图通过对文本的分析研究探讨语言与社会之间的关系。事实上，人们所使用的语言在一定程度上是由他们的社会背景所决定的。人们所处的地理位置，所受的教育，他们的职业、年龄、性别，以及会话发生的情景都对言者的语言使用具有很大影响。同时，人们所使用的语言对人们的社会背景也具有反作用。语言揭示着人们的社会背景信息，甚至推动人们社会身份的改变。

关键词:《卖花女》   语言变体   社会语言学   关系

Abstract

Pygmalion is one of the representative works of George Bernard Shaw, which tells the story of a flower-selling girl who successfully stepped into the upper class with the help of a linguist Mr. Higgins. This paper take the sociolinguistic perspective to interpret Pygmalion. On one hand, it tries to analyze the language variation in the text. Generally, language variation includes: regional variation, social variation and register. This research collected the Characters’ language and analyze the language variations in their language. On the other hand, it tries to find out the relationship between society and language by studying the text. Through utterance analysis, we reaffirm the inseparable relationship between language and society. People’s language is in certain sense determined by their social backgrounds. People’ geographic position, education, social status, career, gender, age and also the situation of the conversation all have impact on one’s language use. Meanwhile, people’s language in its turn, reveals information about the speakers’ social background and even influence people’s social status.

Keywords:Pygmalion   language variation   sociolinguistics   relationship