A Tentative Study On The Correlation Between Social Status And Verbal Behavior

Language is more than just words. It's one of the most powerful emblems of social behavior. In normal transfer of information through language, we use language to send vital social messages about who we are, where we come from, and who we associate with. It is often shocking to realize how extensively we may judge a person's background, social status, character and intentions based simply upon the person's language, dialect, or, in some instances, even the choice of a single word. Sociolinguists regard the speech between the speaker and the addressee as the social acts and take for granted that speech could reflect social status of the speakers, especially status-discrepancy between people of higher social status and people of lower social status. Meanwhile, people of different social status would conduct different speech whit their status-discrepancy characteristic. The reason why we always employ different languages and manners of speaking when we communicate is that the internal differentiation of human societies is reflected in their languages. Different social groups use different linguistic varieties, and as experienced members of a speech community we have learnt to classify speakers according to their social status. As the saying goes: "人有三六九等,话有五花八门" . This thesis tries to probe into the relationship between social status and verbal behavior. After analyzing extracts in both daily life and literary works in view of sociolinguistic and pragmatics, we come to conclude that social status and verbal behavior correlates positively with each other. Language is a reflection of social status, and people of different social status would consciously and unconsciously conduct speech marked with their own characteristic.This thesis begins with the traits of the relationship between language and social status, based on the theoretical knowledge of social status, linguistic items, cooperative principle, utterance politeness and turn-taking variables, and goes further with the relationship between social status and verbal behavior.The thesis is developed in four chapters.Chapter one is an introduction, in which we outline the relationship between language and social status, the rational of the study, what is new in the study and the layout.Chapter two presents the classification of social status together with the researches done by researchers of pragmatics and sociolinguistics concerning the correlation between social status and verbal behavior.Chapter three, the core of this thesis, provides the detailed analysis of the correlation between social status and verbal behavior from the perspective of linguistic items, Cooperative Principle, Utterance Politeness and Turn-taking variables. In this part, the pragmatic and sociolinguistic approach to the correlation between social status and verbal behavior will be applied to the material in both daily life and literary works and some conclusions might be drawn from the analysis of them. The general conclusion goes like this: social status and verbal behavior correlates positively with each other. Language is a reflection of social status, and people of different social status would consciously and unconsciously conduct speeches marked with their own characteristics.Chapter four draws the conclusion that social status and verbal behavior correlate positively with each other. Besides, the existing problems and prospects of further related study are listed.