Leiden University Student Repository

Tetteroo, Carlijn (2022)

The Discriminatory Power of Language: A Socio-Historic Stylistic Analysis of Jane Austen’s Germanic and Latinate Word-Use

Bachelor thesis | Engelse taal en cultuur (BA)

Stylistic research, though it is proven an effective tool in literary analysis, does not always extend its focus beyond the textual world of the researched data. This thesis aims to unite corpus linguistic methods with the socio-historic topic of the prescriptivist language culture in Late Modern England, when words of either Germanic or Latinate origin carried pronounced social and gender-associated connotations. A multi-method approach of keyness and concordancing of Jane Austen’s repertoire explored her etymological distributional patterns, which appeared mostly Germanic. This was not wholly gender-related, as she used fewer Latinate keywords than the average female contemporary author. Considering her negative keywords were also predominantly Germanic, and taking into account that different characters had different etymological distributions based on their social standing, it was concluded that Austen was likely confident in both Germanic and Latinate vocabularies, and could...Show moreStylistic research, though it is proven an effective tool in literary analysis, does not always extend its focus beyond the textual world of the researched data. This thesis aims to unite corpus linguistic methods with the socio-historic topic of the prescriptivist language culture in Late Modern England, when words of either Germanic or Latinate origin carried pronounced social and gender-associated connotations. A multi-method approach of keyness and concordancing of Jane Austen’s repertoire explored her etymological distributional patterns, which appeared mostly Germanic. This was not wholly gender-related, as she used fewer Latinate keywords than the average female contemporary author. Considering her negative keywords were also predominantly Germanic, and taking into account that different characters had different etymological distributions based on their social standing, it was concluded that Austen was likely confident in both Germanic and Latinate vocabularies, and could exploit their respective social connotations to characterise her diction and that of her characters. From this could furthermore be concluded that Austen exhibited, unlike past assertions, a clearly individualised style.Show less

Author

Tetteroo, Carlijn

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Supervisors

Gordon, M.S.

ECTS Credits

10

Language

en