A Sociolinguistic Analysis Of The Employment Of Turn-taking In Hamlet

Shakespeare, the great English poet and dramatist, is known as the greatest drama genius of all the times. When it comes to Shakespeare, everyone thinks of his masterpiece Hamlet, of the leading character Hamlet, of the famous line "To be or not to be, that is the question" and of the sad and graceful love. Hamlet is not a one act drama. It leaves its mark on history not only because of its rich social content and profound philosophical meanings but also because of its ingenious use of language. Hamlet has been analyzed from several approaches. The reason why Hamlet hesitates to take revenge is still a controversial problem for the scholars all over the world, but little attention is paid to how Hamlet uses language to achieve his revenge.Sociolinguistics is developing rapidly these years, especially when blended with other principles. This paper will apply the theories of sociolinguistics and conversational analysis to the study of literature. This is not the first analysis of Hamlet, but the approach is brand-new. The related theories used in this paper are power, age and gender in sociolinguistics; and turn-taking in conversational analysis. In this thesis paper, the characters in Hamlet will be divided into different groups according to the sociolinguistic aspects. By using the data from Shakespeare's Hamlet, this thesis paper will design an analysis model to analyze their social roles in different groups, their strategies and use of turn-taking, in order to prove that social aspects play an important role in turn-taking and the different strategies of using turn-taking helps Hamlet's revenge.As a result, this paper successfully applies sociolinguistics and conversational analysis together to a literary work and gives a new method to appreciate Hamlet. But there are still limitations in the paper, like the subjectivity of the data collection.