LANGUAGE AND PLACE

   Test creates a sense of place in 2 main ways:

   - through description of places (provides geographical background and sometimes a symbolic
   dimension -- see Wuthering Heights)

   - through the particular ways in which characters (and sometimes narrator) speak           

   

   Language variations and varieties:

   - accents

   - dialects

   - registers- variety switching, repertoire available to individual speakers according to the
   situation of use

   

   Attitudes to language varieties -- uneven, traditionally a question of hierarchy, related to
   historical, social and political changes in society

   

   Language variety in lit. texts:

   Before 16th century -- English, Latin and French

   Change in the Elizabethan period

   18th c - eminent literary qualities of English

    Dialect representation -- within the constraints of the genre style, illusion of speech to
   give an aura of authenticity or to establish the social diversification of the characters

   Modernism - polyphony of voices but still subordinated to an authoritative standard voice of
   the narrator

   Postmodernism -- multiplicity, equality, post-colonialism -- different experiences of place and
   connections between voice, region and sense of identity

   

   LANGUAGE AND TIME

   All languages change over the course of time

   A text may be a force for a language change or may retard it

   Theories of language change:

   -         as an anonymous process

   -         as a politically motivated process

   LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY

   Language - crucial to the creation and maintenance of both social relationship and social
   identities. The ways we use language -- important signals about the social order and our own
   place within it

   LANGUAGE AND CONTEXT

   Contexts which affect register

    1. the mode or medium (spoken, written)
    2. the social relationships or participants in the situation, which determine the tone
    3. the purpose

   LANGUAGE AND GENDER

   Language plays an important role in shaping the social scene and constructing social
   indetities

   Male as the norm -- see generic use of "man" or "he"

   Female as downgraded or derogated -- see asymmetrical distribution of "master" -- "mistress",
   "Mr" -- "Mrs", "Miss"

   Change in the 70s

   V. Woolf: a woman's sentence

   

   

   Some types of language change:

   Archaism

   Feminist changes to language

   Politically correct speech

   

   Some other terms

   Euphemism

   Pleonasm

   Tautology