A Corpus-Aided Study of Language Features of 'The Importance of Being Earnest'

Autor/in	Junmei, Jiang
Titel	A Corpus-Aided Study of Language Features of 'The Importance of Being Earnest'
Quelle	In: Journal on English Language Teaching, 7 (2017) 2, S.29-38 (10 Seiten) PDF als Volltext kostenfreie Datei Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	2231-3338
Schlagwörter	Drama; Computational Linguistics; English Literature; Teaching Methods; Computer Software; Humor; Literary Devices; Social Attitudes; Figurative Language; Discourse Analysis; Authors; Comedy; Literary Criticism; Syntax; Language Usage; Language Variation; Foreign Countries; Second Language Learning; Second Language Instruction; United Kingdom; China + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Schauspiel; Linguistics; Computerlinguistik; Englische literatur; Teaching method; Lehrmethode; Unterrichtsmethode; Humoristische Darstellung; Literaturarbeit; Social attidude; Soziale Einstellung; Diskursanalyse; Author; Autor; Autorin; Komödie; Literaturkritik; Sprachgebrauch; Sprachenvielfalt; Ausland; Zweitsprachenerwerb; Fremdsprachenunterricht; Großbritannien
Abstract	Oscar Wilde is one of the most hilarious playwrights in the history of English literature. And 'The Importance of Being Earnest' is his masterpiece. With Wilde's humorous and witty language as the starting point and aided by the concordancing software WORDSMITH TOOLS, a detailed analysis was carried out on this comedy from lexical level and syntactical level, interesting and significant findings are found: 1) The comedy is about love and marriage. It mainly focuses on being earnest and is related with the behavior of bunbury. Besides their individuality, all characters have the nature of superficiality and hypocrisy. Each one treats the serious things such as death and religion with triviality, yet regards name and pleasure as things of vital importance. The main theme of the comedy is the duality of Victorian people, who are earnest and elegant in appearance, but superficial and absurd in nature, and who is wearing the mask of manners and telling lies whenever they like. Wilde holds a disapproving attitude against the society by frequently using the words of negative meaning or in the negative context. Some words give new meaning to describe the occurrence of things that cannot be controlled, but people act as if they could be, presenting characters' power in controlling things and other people. All the above statements are justified by lexical features of the text. 2) Wilde has an opposed and ironic attitude to the world he was living in. He knew the upper class, and he knew that the lives they led were so dry, boring, concerned with manners and customs, and so perfectly earnest that it was almost inhuman. Therefore, a lot of negatives appear in the text. High occurrences of negatives also show characters' ideas against convention and people's expectations. Corpus-assisted literary analysis provides authentic contextual data that show meaningful information in the text and give students an immediate sense of the style of the text. Driven by objective data of linguistic features and the background language, students can see the foregrounding characteristics of a given text and its artistic values and consequently can appreciate the literary work better and have a deeper understanding of the language. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01