摘 要

爱尔兰剧作家乔治·萧伯纳创作的喜剧《皮格马利翁》是以罗马神话中的雕像之恋为蓝本，展现了一位语音学教授亨利·悉金斯在三个月内，训练一位发音，语言低俗的卖花女莉莎·杜利托，使其成功进入上流社会的公众场合进而被接受的故事。本论文将从J. Fishman的微观社会语言学理论角度，在方言、语域、正式程度三大方面多角度、多层次地研究萧伯纳戏剧作品《皮格马利翁》中的语言变体现象，以期对其他读者理解该文学作品和语言变体现象有所帮助。

关键词：乔治·萧伯纳；《皮格马利翁》；语言变体

Contents

1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………….1
2. Demonstration…………………………………………………………………….3
   1. Dialectal Varieties in Pygmalion………………………………………………….3
      1. Regional dialect……………………………………………………………….4
      2. Sociolect……………………………………………………………………....6
         1. Class differentiation…………………………………………………………...6
         2. Gender differentiation………………………………………………………..10
         3. Age differentiation…………………………………………………………...11
   2. Register in Pygmalion……………………………………………………………12
      1. Field of discourse…………………………………………………………….14
      2. Tenor of discourse……………………………………………………………15
      3. Mode of discourse……………………………………………………………16
   3. Degree of formality in Pygmalion………………………………………………..17
      1. Differences at lexical level…………………………………………………...17
      2. Differences at syntactic level…………………………………………….......18
3. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………….19

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………..21

Bibliography………………………………………………………………………….22

An Analysis of Language Varieties in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion

1. Introduction

1.1 George Bernard Shaw and Pygmalion

George Bernard Shaw (July 26, 1856 – November 2, 1950) was an Irish playwright, essayist, novelist and literary critic. Born in Synge Street, Dublin, Shaw lived in an atmosphere of music. In his family, his mother was a professional singer and one of his sisters was a singer of musical comedy and light opera. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60 plays. He is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize in Literature (1925) and an Academy Award (1938), for his contributions to literature and for his work on the film Pygmalion (an adaptation of his play of the same name), respectively. Several of his plays formed the basis of musicals after his death—most famously the musical My Fair Lady—it is officially adapted from the screenplay of the film version of Pygmalion rather than the original stage play.

Pygmalion was written in 1912 as Shaw’s most popular play. It has transcended cultural and language barriers since its first production. Pygmalion is one of the most famous comic plays of George Bernard Shaw, named after a Greek mythological character. In this play, a modern variant of the myth, the underclass flower girl Eliza Doolittle is metaphorically "brought to life" by a phonetics professor, Henry Higgins, who teaches her to refine her accent and conversation and thus conducts herself with upper-class manners in social situations. Pygmalion has received wide critical attention and has been studied from different perspectives. Nowadays, the analysis of Shaw’s Pygmalion is mostly related to the aspect of stylistics or translatology. With the rapid development of sociolinguistics, the phenomenon of language varieties in Pygmalion has become an important research topic in sociolinguistics. More and more academic findings are based on the view of sociolinguistics. Analyzing language varieties in Pygmalion is helpful for readers to know more about this play and the phenomenon of language varieties.

1.2 Language Varieties