Articulating prejudice: A linguistic perspective on animated movies

Various English dialects receive differential treatment in media directed at children. The motivation for the present study occurred after encountering explanations for negative attitudes displayed by children towards nonstandard dialects, which failed to locate the source(s) of such attitudes. In this study, it is argued that the movie industry (in particular, the animated film industry), plays a crucial role in such socialization.;The goal of this study is to examine the linguistic mechanisms through which the discourse of the animated movie emits and sustains relations of power and ideology. The framework of analysis is derived from current theories of critical linguistics which seek to describe and explain the linguistic devices utilized to reflect and sustain asymmetrical power relations in a given society. The data corpus consists of excerpts from animated movies produced over the last 50 years.;Linguistic analyses of the data demonstrate a consistent attempt to present speakers of nonstandard varieties of English as powerless proletarians of low cultural and socioeconomic status. The asymmetry in attitudes towards dialects in this medium is achieved via linguistic devices, and the various chapters of the dissertation examine the lexical, syntactic, and textual means through which this is achieved.;A major generalization is that in these movies, the naive child audience is presented with a social reality in which dialectal variations are systematically synthesized with variations in power and moral worth. The consequence is a differential portrayal of dialects in children's movies which demonstrate the workings of an ideology not immediately evident from the propositional content, where the portrayal of the dialects seems to be overtly neutral, but whose lexical choices, speech act transgressions, and non-reciprocal textual devices such as rudeness, to give a few examples, provide clear evidence of differential treatment. The results demonstrate how, via the control of the type and nature of various linguistic devices, the dominant ideology's prejudice towards such dialects of English is sustained.;It is argued that a linguistic analysis of such data is necessary for the linguist interested not only in the application(s) of language, but more importantly, in the ideologies of language which reflect and sustain inequalities between groups. This project seeks not only to outline an in-depth theoretical apparatus for analyzing the language of inequality and prejudice, but in addition, strives to provide an intensive discursive analysis of the linguistic manifestation of such inequalities.