戏剧文学 卖花女.doc

Analysis of My Fair Lady College of foreign language studies Grade: 2010 Class: English 1 Name: 刘雅妮 100801108 Sociolinguistic Analysis of My Fair Lady Abstract: My Fair Lady is a movie about how a poor flower girl turns to a lady by simply changing her language at the help of a linguist. It demonstrates in a dramatic way the importance of language as a social identity of a person and the influence a language exerts on a person’s experience. This paper tries to explain some phenomena in the movie in a social linguistics view, focusing on variations of language caused by gender difference and class difference. The paper hopes to help the reader to know better the charm of language through the analysis and to have a profound understanding of the film. Key words: sociolinguistic; gender difference; class-related variation I. Introduction Sociolinguistic is the study of language in relation to society. It is believed that language is an essential part in our lives because it is?a very structured set of symbols?by which we can identify ourselves in the world. Just as it is impossible for two people to have identical experiences, so the language of two people will never be the same. A person’s language is closely related to his/her social background and vice versa, his/her experience will to a large extent be determined by the language he/she speaks. The movie My Fair Lady is a good illustration. My Fair Lady is a movie about how a poor flower girl named Eliza changes her life by changing her language at the help of a famous linguist Professor Higgins. Eliza is a lower-class flower girl selling flowers on the streets who speaks?terrible English. Higgins boasts to his friend Pickering that he could turn this girl into a real lady in six months simply by teaching her Standard English. Eliza also wants to become genteel so that she could find a job in a flower shop, therefore she goes to Higgins for help. The game begins and after two months Eliza successfully turns into