An Analysis Of The Conversations In Daisy Miller From The Perspective Of Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics holds that language not only delivers people's thoughts but also contains social meaning.Social features of an interlocutor can be presented in his language.It's well known that a literature work is a manifestation of the real world,and its language is also constructed in a certain social context.Therefore,it's worth adopting sociolinguistic theories to study literature works.Daisy Miller is of great importance in the field of literature for its international theme.This novel reflects the cultural conflicts between old Europe and new America through characters' conversations.This study will take these conversations as data to study the relation between language and social identity and social relations.This paper,based on the sociolinguistic theories,analyzes the conversations between the hero and the heroine in the novel Daisy Miller quantitatively and qualitatively.Through the study,three research objectives are expected to be achieved.The first is to explore the differences of lexical and syntactical choices and conversation structure between the two characters.The second is to analyze the relation between conversations and the characters' social identity and social relations.And the third one is to explore the social and cultural factors that caused the differences.Through the analysis of the conversations,the following results are concluded.Firstly,through analyzing the language features of the two characters,it's clear that compared with the hero,the heroin Daisy tends to choose those words and sentences with more feelings.It shows Daisy's social identity as a new American and Winterbourne's social identity as a European gentleman.Secondly,the conversations are analyzed from dynamic aspects.Through analyzing conversation structure of the two characters,it's found that there exist great gender differences in turn length,topic management and the forms of adjacency pair.Different conversation structures reflect different social relations and distance between the two characters.Finally,based on the views of interactional sociolinguistics,this study further explains the reasons for their communicative failure.And the reasons can be concluded as their different gender and sociocultural background.Their different language use reflects the sociocultural conflicts between old Europe and new America,which further proves language is constructed in society and is interacted with social factors.Through sociolinguistic analysis of literature works,it's hoped to enrich the application of sociolinguistic theories and achieve a better understanding of social identity and social relations among characters in literature works.