Abstract
In this paper, the author supports the claim that there is an inevitable relationship between language and social class to which a speaker (character) belongs. The paper claims that a literary language is a manifestation of the verbal practices done by real speakers in real communicative situations. The paper illustrates that Bernard Shaw in Pygmalion used the concept of “language variation” as a stylistic device to reveal some significant social aspects of Eliza Doolittle, the main character of the play. Drawing on Basil Bernstein’s distinction between elaborated code and restricted code, the paper compares between Eliza as a low -class illiterate speaker and the same Eliza after having intensive linguistic training by Prof. Higgins. The analysis is based on some selected extracts of Eliza’s speech in different conversational scenes in the play. The paper hypothizes that literary discourse, mainly dialogues, can be treated as an ordinary language used in real conversational situations. The analysis was conducted from phonological, syntactic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic perspectives.
Highlights
It is needless to say that the role of speech in the linguistic analysis of literary texts cannot be denied (C.f Page, 1973) and that no stylistic analysis can be fulfilled without taking speech or character talk as the main source of data to be studied and analyzed
The importance of this study comes from the fact that it incorporates between stylistics and sociolinguistics, following Turner (1973) who clearly states that “stylistics is that part of linguistics, which concentrates on variation in the use of language, often, but not exclusively, with special attention to the most conscious and complex uses of language in literature” ( Turner, 1973, p. 7)
We can conclude that Bernstein’s restricted and elaborated codes were successfully presented by Bernard Shaw
Summary
It is needless to say that the role of speech in the linguistic analysis of literary texts cannot be denied (C.f Page, 1973) and that no stylistic analysis can be fulfilled without taking speech or character talk as the main source of data to be studied and analyzed. It interrelates between stylistics and discourse analysis, given the fact that speech is the core of discourse, and that any discourse study takes into consideration speech as a priority in the analysis. This approach is based on three disciplines, stylistics, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis.
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