A Sociolinguistic Inquiry Into Shakespeare\u27s Othello

Every time we open our mouths to speak we are performing an aspect of our identity in language. How we perform our selves is influenced by the social expectations and pressures around us, as well as our relationship to our auditors in the linguistic market. My thesis examines these pressures through William Shakespeare\u27s Othello, looking at how Othello\u27s identity is negotiated in his dynamic language and how the Venetian society sees him as an other by analyzing the density of Latinate words in various characters\u27 monologues. With key theorists Piene Bourdieu, Edward Said, and Irving Goffman, as well as drawing on my own experiences as a foreigner in .. Japan, I address issues sunounding language performance especially when using a foreign language. Ultimately my thesis seeks to address the question: how ought we treat foreigners based on their language

Anonymity and Imitation in Linguistic Identity Disguise

Authorship attribution can be highly accurate, but most techniques are based on the assumption that authors have not attempted to disguise their writing style. Research has found that when writers had deliberately altered their style, commonly used authorship analysis techniques only performed at the level of random chance. This is problematic because many forensic authorship cases investigate documents where it is believed that an author has tried to impersonate somebody else for criminal purposes, and has attempted to adapt their writing style to do so. This study uses a corpus of scripts from the BBC drama, The Archers, to explore how authors write different characters’ voices. Scriptwriters need to adapt their writing style to create the different characters’ dialogues, and this fictional identity disguise is used as a proxy to examine authorship analysis techniques in forensic linguistics. The thesis begins with a literature review exploring the nature of linguistic identity and literary characterisation. It considers the advantages and disadvantages of using fictional data to address forensic problems. There are three main studies: firstly, a quantitative analysis comparing inter-author consistency and variation of authorship analysis features; the second study is a qualitative, stylistic analysis of characterisation, exploring lexical choice, use of dialect, and (im)politeness strategies. The third study is a corpus analysis of the different pragmatic functions of shared lexical tokens. The studies showed that as writers adapted their linguistic style to create different characters, results for commonly-used attribution techniques were observably affected. Some linguistic identities were more distinctive than others, and some authors were more clearly identifiable than others. At a pragmatic level, authors showed more inter-character consistency, and a reduced ability to anonymise their own linguistic traits. This reinforces the importance of investigating linguistic identity disguise at higher levels of language analysis, in addition to lower-level, structural features

Stories Of The Past: Viewing History Through Fiction

This thesis investigates how effective works of fiction are, through their depictions of past worlds, in providing us with a resource for the study of the history of the period in which that fiction is set. It assesses past academic literature on the role of fiction in historical understanding, and on the processes involved in the writing, reading, adapting, and interpreting of fiction. It contends that the creation and consumption of fiction has not been looked at in a holistic way in terms of an overall process that takes us from author to consumer with all of the potential intermediate steps. The thesis proposes and describes such a process model, each step within which contains a number of key elements, namely actors, actions, influences, artefacts, and finally the real and imagined worlds of the fiction. It begins with the author, who through actions of perception and adaptation, and affected by various external influences, social, political, and aesthetic, mediates with elements of his or her contemporary world and incorporates them into the imagined world of the initial artefact, the novel. It describes how at each stage in the process other actors (critics, adapters and curators) engage with previous artefacts such as the novel and previous adaptations, and their own set of influences, and through actions of reception, adaptation and interpretation create further artefacts such as critical reviews, adaptations and tourist interpretations that comprise further imagined worlds that can be compared to the author’s original imagined world, and by extension, the original past world. Using a number of case studies of English novels of the period from 1800 to 1930, the thesis assesses what the practical evidence of the process in action tells us about the ability of a novel to act as an adjunct to contemporary records in providing insights into that original real world. These studies incorporate analysis of the novels themselves, and of subsequent artefacts such as film and television adaptations, curated literary places and guidebooks, and both professional and lay reviews. The thesis concludes that fiction in its various forms, and especially in its adapted and interpreted forms, whilst not a pure historical document as such, has the ability to provide us with a vivid perception of a past world. It contends that the process model could be used as an aid in the teaching of History or English Literature, or as an aid to the general consumer of fiction, to help remove the layers of imagined worlds that potentially lie between us and a past historical world, thereby reducing the ability of that layering to create a misleading view of history

The Apothecary's Tales: a game of language in a language of games

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in partial fulfilment requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Creative Writing)The thesis shows how the novel The Apothecary's Tales manipulates narrative frames to create a 'simulachron', an unreliable virtual world, which problematises the reader's conceptions of the past. The novel transgresses the generic rules of 'historical fiction' to create a quality of 'historicity' located in the affect of alterity. This is argued to be a somatic response to peril deferred. The novel seeks to evoke alterity by defamiliarising linguistic norms. It does this principally through the use of 'diachronic polysemia' (lexical 'false friends') and intertexts to syncopate the reader continually between the disparate sensibilities of the 1ih and 21 st centuries. These sensibilities are simulated in the novel by the imbedment of sociolects and 'hypomemes', the tacit thoughtways supposed peculiar to a given milieu. To self-authenticate its fictions, the novel employs the 'parafictive' devices of a testamentary found artifact, an unreliable narrator and editor, plausible sociologuemes (social conventions) and ideologuemes (ideologies that inform behaviour), along with a density of period minutiae putatively grounded in the record. Any truth effects achieved are then ludically subverted by a process of critique in which structural units of the novel systematically parody the other. The novel is patterned in the structure of a nested diptych, of expositions contra posed in a mutual commentary, which extends from the defining templates of plot and episode to the micro levels of morphemes in polysemic wordplay. The tropes of nested framing and repetition of form and syntagm are defined in the thesis, respectively, as encubi/atio and 'emblematic resonance'. It is argued that these tropes, encoded in a fictive discourse that defies closure, provide a simulation of hermetic form that -when mapped upon the aleatory life world -can be productive of aesthetic affect. The agonistic elements of plot and incident in the novel are figured within the tapas of theatre, foregrounded by the duplicitous self-fashioning of the characters, and by the continual metaleptic shifts or 'frame syncopation' of narrative viewpoint, both intra and extra-diegetic. Frame syncopation is used advisedly to dilemmatise significations at both the structural and syntagmatic levels. The thesis contends that such contrived collisions of narrative interpretation may be the dynamic of affectivity in all aesthetic discourse

Identifying Stylometric Correlates of Social Power

This thesis takes a stylometric approach to the measurement of social power, particularly hierarchical power in an organisational setting. Following the social constructionist view of identity, we infer that construction of identity is an ongoing process incorporating the full scope of human behaviour, including linguistic behaviour. We test the primary hypothesis that stylistic choice in language is indicative of power relations, and that a stylometric signal can be extracted from natural language to enable prediction of relationship status. Additionally, we consider the effect of individual variation versus interpersonal variation, and the effects of aggregating predictions to boost the predictive strength of the model. Three different datasets are used to validate the proposed approach across three different genres: email, spoken conversation, and online chat. We also present a vector space approach to modelling linguistic style accommodation, and undertake a preliminary examination of the correlation between linguistic accommodation and social power

Dating Victorians: an experimental approach to stylochronometry

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ofthe University of LutonThe writing style of a number of authors writing in English was empirically investigated for the purpose of detecting stylistic patterns in relation to advancing age. The aim was to identify the type of stylistic markers among lexical, syntactical, phonemic, entropic, character-based, and content ones that would be most able to discriminate between early, middle, and late works of the selected authors, and the best classification or prediction algorithm most suited for this task. Two pilot studies were initially conducted. The first one concentrated on Christina Georgina Rossetti and Edgar Allan Poe from whom personal letters and poetry were selected as the genres of study, along with a limited selection of variables. Results suggested that authors and genre vary inconsistently. The second pilot study was based on Shakespeare's plays using a wider selection of variables to assess their discriminating power in relation to a past study. It was observed that the selected variables were of satisfactory predictive power, hence judged suitable for the task. Subsequently, four experiments were conducted using the variables tested in the second pilot study and personal correspondence and poetry from two additional authors, Edna St Vincent Millay and William Butler Yeats. Stepwise multiple linear regression and regression trees were selected to deal with the first two prediction experiments, and ordinal logistic regression and artificial neural networks for two classification experiments. The first experiment revealed inconsistency in accuracy of prediction and total number of variables in the final models affected by differences in authorship and genre. The second experiment revealed inconsistencies for the same factors in terms of accuracy only. The third experiment showed total number of variables in the model and error in the final model to be affected in various degrees by authorship, genre, different variable types and order in which the variables had been calculated. The last experiment had all measurements affected by the four factors. Examination of whether differences in method within each task play an important part revealed significant influences of method, authorship, and genre for the prediction problems, whereas all factors including method and various interactions dominated in the classification problems. Given the current data and methods used, as well as the results obtained, generalizable conclusions for the wider author population have been avoided

Análisis fonoestilístico del cuento corto poético The Insect God escrito por Edward Gorey

Edward Gorey, escritor e ilustrador estadounidense, creó un sinnúmero de composiciones cortas escritas en versos rimados. Sin embargo, los versos rimados representan un gran desafío para la traducción, pues exigen recodificar el significado y la disposición formal de aquellos recursos lingüísticos utilizados. Esta investigación pretende, por tanto, analizar la estilística del cuento corto poético The Insect God, uno de los trabajos más conocidos de este artista, para identificar el uso motivado de los marcadores de estilo en la obra, en especial aquellos que conciernen a la fonología y la prosodia. Los resultados de la investigación han determinado que no solo el verso y la rima aparecen como marcadores de estilo en el cuento corto poético, sino que entre los planos de fondo (narratología) y de forma (lingüística) hay trece marcadores en total. Por ende, este estudio demuestra que la inclusión de los marcadores de estilo en la traducción es fundamental considerando que estos marcadores conllevan una carga de significado por sí mismos. Además, los resultados de este análisis han servido como guía y referencia para proceder con una propuesta de traducción que sea estilísticamente más eficiente en comparación con el único encargo de traducción oficial y autorizado al español de este cuento: El Dios de los Insectos de la casa editorial española “Libros del Zorro Rojo” traducido por Marcial Souto

A study of the language in Tobias Smollett's 'Roderick Random'

The language of Smollett is often commented on, but seldom described. This thesis attempts to describe the language of his first, formative novel. The ten chapters form two "Parts," of five chapters each, reflecting the two methods of description used. "Part I" analyses and compares selected, representative passages. The central passage from Roderick Random for each chapter appears again in "Appendix 1,1: photographed from the fourth edition of 1755. "Part I" is weighted towards narration. "Part 11," weighted towards dialogue, traces certain pervasive language features throughout the novel: names, regional dialects, occupational dialects, idiolects, and proverbs and catch-phrases. The aim of the study is not, primarily, to characterize Smollett's idiosyncracies, but to discover in this novel his effective devices. The "Conclusion" summarizes these devices, in arguing that most of them work to create that 'vigour' which impresses so many commentators as a fundamental aspect of Smollett's prose. Also included are two appendices, on grammatical terms and phonemic symbols, to assist the bias towards linguistics that occasionally manifests itself in this description of language. "Appendix IV" is a personal supplement to the New English Dictionary. This "Abstract" is enlarged upon in the "Introduction.

George Orwell and Raymond Williams : a comparison of their thoughts on politics, letters and language

Bibliography: pages 221-230.The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between George Orwell and Raymond Williams as reflected in their respective writings on politics, letters and language. The study aims to provide a close historical reading of exemplary texts written by Orwell and Williams. This involves: description of the historical context in which the texts were produced; close analysis of the selected texts; and summarising their related writings in these three areas in order to place the 'exemplary texts' in the context of their work as a whole. Finally, having thus provided a synthesis of their respective thoughts on politics, letters and language, the similarities and differences between Orwell and Williams are derived. The conclusion drawn in this study is that notwithstanding several important differences, Orwell and Williams share a number of fundamental assumptions and beliefs in these defined areas. In their 'political' writings, they share a reliance on the evidence of experience; a sense of Britain as a society governed ultimately by consensus rather than by conflict; and a commitment to similar forms of socialist-humanism. In their work on letters, they both resist the dominant definitions of 'literature'; they both explore the relation between 'politics' and 'letters'; and they both seek to use 'letters' in the service of (socialist) 'politics'. In their understandings of language, both Orwell and Williams assume a 'unified subject' that precedes language as the source of meaning; they both insist on the existence of some pre-linguistic 'reality'; and they share a sense of language as being in some way constitutive. The differences between Orwell and Williams can be summarised as follows: first, they wrote in different contexts; second, they represent different constituences of British socialism (Orwell middle-class and Williams working-class}; and third, whereas Orwell is a popular essayist, Williams is a literary academic, who explores the many concerns they share with greater subtlety and care