Language And Culture In Tudor England

This dissertation aims to study language and culture in Tudor England. It is obvious that Tudor England (1485-1603) was a time when English feudal system began to break down and capitalist economy and production began to emerge and deveop rapidly. Given the importance of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Administration Reform and the Overseas Expansion, we see acceleration of ongoing changes of culture, English language and technology in Tudor England.Culture is a complex matter, including knowledge, belief, art, morals, customs and other capabilities acquired by people as a member of society. Development of culture is based on language which is the keystone of culture, thus making culture and language more closely integrated in Tudor England. Consequently, Tudor England witnessed this culture and language development. This dissertation seeks to discover how culture and language correlated in Tudor England from the perspective of the English language with the cultural and social background.In this dissertation, based on interdisciplinary theories involving Cultural Linguistics and Sociolinguistics, a large amount of historical data together with theoretical and empirical scholarship concerning language and culture in Tudor England have been surveyed. And multimodal methods have been devised integrating both humanistic research methods such as history, contrast analysis, description and interpretation and those of social sciences, for example, case study, so as to construct systematically the culture and language development and interaction in Tudor England.Having conducted the systematic analysis of the characteristics of culture (the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Administration Reform and the Overseas Expansion) and the characteristics of language in Tudor England (Gender Differentiation, Social Stratification, Regional Variation and Register), the author has made it possible to test the applicability of cultural linguistic and sociolinguistic methods to historical data, which consist of personal letters to form a 2.7 million-word electronic corpus entitled The Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC). This dissertation has revealed the interaction of culture and language in Tudor England by using effectively the numerical information of the CEEC in this study.A further issue meriting closer scrutiny in this study is cultural linguistics ranging from cultural nature of language, cultural values of language, cultural qualities of language and cultural exchange of language. And the social cultural factors associated with the application of language, the humane ecological environment on language development, and the social political culture and language development have been studied so as to indicate that the interaction of culture and language in Tudor England greatly promoted the capitalist development in England.The method that has been developed to explore the interaction of culture and language in Tudor England involves reconstructing past stages of both language and society. The approach is interdisciplinary, drawing on sociolinguistics and cultural linguistics, as well as social history. The requirements of validity in this study need empirical validity, social validity and historical validity. What makes the CEEC different from other historical corpora is the fact that it has been designed to provide access to the language of individual informants, whose social backgrounds have been investigated as accurately as possible. Therefore, the CEEC offers an easy access to the language of people who lived in England between c.1410 and 1681, thus enabling the author to study the interaction of culture and language in Tudor England by exploring gender differentiation, social stratification, regional variation and register variation.The relations between culture and language are highly complex, and the findings of this study can be approached from the following angles:(1) Regional Variation (2) Social Stratification (3) Gender Differentiation, and (4) Register Variation.The findings of this study have shown that London had already become the centre of English in Tudor England, as London's massive growth depended on wealth and power concentrated in one place. Consequently, London was the most important regional factor to promote English development. Owing to profound social, economic and political changes around 1558, Social Stratification emerges as one of the most robust social variables in studying characteristics of language in Tudor England. The findings of this study have also shown that the innovations in personal letter writing were strongly favoured by men in Tudor England.The findings of this study fully support the cultural linguistic and sociolinguistic approach by indicating that cultural factors significantly correlate with the interaction of culture and language in Tudor England. In this dissertation, Regional Variation and Gender Differentiation have proved to be the most likely independent variable to correlate with linguistic innovation (ye/you;-th/-s; mine, thine/my, thy and the which/which), and Register Variation has shown the least influence on English in Tudor England. Personal letter writing is more likely to correlate with linguistic innovation than official documents.Though a comparatively systematic study of language and culture in Tudor England has been presented in a metadisciplinary perspective in this dissertation, there are still some CEEC limits to this study, such as the very limited number of informants from the lower society, limited regional coverage and so on. The interaction of culture and language in Tudor England deserves a further study in the future.We conclude that in cultural linguistics and sociolinguistics this study of language and culture in Tudor England can assume an active role in shaping the way both British Studies and English language teaching is duely conducted, which is inspiring and applicable to improving students'cultural background knowledge and improving students'literacy and qualities more effectively.