Valentyn Dudko
(Kamyanets-Podilsky Ivan Ohiienko National University)
Scientific Supervisor: M.V. Matkovska, Senior Lecturer
THE SOCIOLINGUISTIC PECULIARITIES OF BERNARD SHAW’S “PYGMALION”
The social peculiarities of language variation in Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” have been interpreted by many scholars, e.g. E. Andrecht, H. Beardsmore, M. Joos, R. Maclaury, T. Shopen and others. The main personage of “Pygmalion” is a flower girl from East London called Eliza. She had suddenly met The Note Taker (Professor of Phonetics Henry Higgins), who paid a lot attention to her pronunciation and made her the subject of an “experiment”, betting that he could change the way she spoke. The story is an example of a live and contextual portrait of how language, particularly its social and semantic peculiarities play a great role in the achievement of communicative competence [3; 4].
Looking at Eliza in the first act, it is easy to understand that she speaks Cockney, non-standard English language, which is hardly understandable and perceived. This is a true reflection of the social background of the girl who was raised in a low-class family and received a poor education due to the difficult economic situation of the family. These circumstances strongly influence Eliza and she promised that she should master Standard English despite the unfavorable social factors [1, p. 714].
Eliza demonstrates what can be called the poor language performance in her dialogues with others. For example, in her dialogue with Freddie, Eliza puts it this way: “Nah then, Freddy: look wh’ y’ gowin, deah” [5, p. 56]. This statement is obviously non-standard English language, used mainly by uneducated people. This is an example of limited code at the syntactic and phonological levels. At the syntactic level, Eliza uses the above grammatical structure instead of the standard form. Thus, Eliza’s speech is a clear departure from Standard English: “Nah then, Freddy: look wh’ y’ gowin, deah. There’s menners f’ yer! Te-oo banches o voylets trod into the mad [5, p. 6]. Ow, eez ye-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd dan y’ de-ooty. Bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel’s flahrzn. Than ran awy atbaht pyin. Will ye-oo py me f’them I ain’t done nothing wrong by Speaking to the gentleman. I’ve a right to sell flowers if I keep off the kerb” [5, p. 7].
Shortly, the flower girl in the above samples appears as a bad interlocutor compared to her addressee. Both at the macro- and micro-linguistic levels she could not tolerate eloquent and free expressions, and convincing arguments. Thus, the general impression of her language is quite disappointing, and that Shaw can successfully portray her as a lady whose language shows her origin, what class she belongs to, and what type of education she has gone through.
Little by little we will see how drastically Eliza’s language changes as a result of hard language training and learning. Professor Higgins, who is attempting social transformation on lower class lady, believes that the first step to achieving this fundamental social shift has begun with language. According to Higgins, Eliza’s linguistic discrepancy with the norms of Standard English is the main reason for her social unacceptability. This is considered the “deep bay”, which separates the working class from the upper one. Thus, Higgins’ mission is to close this gap between the two classes. Eliza herself is aware of this obstacle because she declares, “I want to speak like a lady” [5, p. 8]. Looking at Eliza’s speech after Higgins’ language training, we find a significant improvement in her language skills. No language errors are visible, and when she makes a mistake, she corrects it immediately. Her conversational turn is full of strong expressions that can indicate her self-confidence in front of the addressee.
It seems to have complete control over the language at all language levels and goes beyond the usual use of the language – a task performed only by native speakers. When choosing words in the process of communication, the speaker consciously or involuntarily takes into account their paradigmatic and syntagmatic connections that are in his linguistic consciousness [2, p. 284].
At the phonological level, it makes sounds very clearly, and her pronunciation is similar to any other native English standard. At the syntactic level, she produces well-structured grammatical sentences, which are usually produced by standard native English speakers [6, p. 89]. At the socio-linguistic level, Eliza can choose the most appropriate style that suits both the communicative situation and the addressee, the art that she mostly missed when she was limited by the language of the code. Eliza is able to successfully demonstrate her argumentative skill, which is illustrated in the use of various types of verbal acts [2, p. 12; 3].
So we may conclude that language can reveal many social aspects of the speaker (character), such as social class, socio-economic status, level of education, conversation efficiency, etc. Through an analysis of Eliza’s speech, it can be concerned that there is an inevitable link between the language performance and communicative competence. These relationships could be easily observed by comparing Eliza’s language performance before and after her studying language with Professor Higgins. It reflects the national mentality, deep cultural traditions and itself becomes a fact of the spiritual culture of the people.
REFERENCES
- Beardsmore, H. (2008). A Sociolinguistic Interpretation of “Pygmalion”. English Studies, 60 (6). P. 712–719.
- Kochergan, M.P. (2001). Vstup do movoznavstva. Kyyv : VC “Akademiya”, 2001. 368 s.
- Maclaury, R.E. (2003). Prototypes revisited. Annual Review of Anthropology. 20, 55–74. DOI: 1146/annurev.an.20.100191.000415.
- Pygmalion: a study of socio-semantics: pygmalion: a study of socio-semantics – http://journal.teflin.org/index.php/journal/article/view/42.
- Shaw, B.G. (1994). New York : Dover Publications Inc.
- Shopen, T. (2007). Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.