A Sociolinguistic Study Of The Major Female Characters’ Social Statuses

This dissertation attempts to explore the interaction between the linguistic variations of American women and their social statuses by a syntactic approach to the sociolinguistic behaviors of females in The Devil Wears Prada and The Bluest Eyes. Previous studies on language and social status mainly focus on the phonetic differences, but the patterns of syntactic variations haven’t attracted enough attention. Based on the collection, classification, and analysis of the total 977 episodes, this research initiates efforts to interpret syntactic preferences of American females in each class and compares different syntactic patterns within the three social classes. The author tries to argue that the linguistic features of American females may reflect their social identities of class, but, at the same time, can be constrained by their social classes. By the methods of quantitative study, induction, and deduction, this argument is validated. Findings of this paper can be instrumental to anyone who wants to integrate in a social class, or try to achieve better understanding, better communication and more successful cooperation with people of other social classes.Structurally, this thesis is composed of seven parts. The first part is the Introduction, which answers the questions about the researching subject, purposes, methodology, and significance of this study. The second part,.or Chapter One, provides a literature review of this thesis. In Chapter Two, incomplete sentences are dealt with from the perspectives of open or closed word classes, and ungrammatical uses of women in the lowest class are also studied. The third chapter deals with the commanding function of imperatives. In the fifth chapter, the functions of tag questions (or tags) are found to be used differently by women of the three social classes. In the last part, Conclusion, summaries are made of the findings of the thesis.