Mid-Atlantic English: A Critical Appraisal
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Título: | Mid-Atlantic English: A Critical Appraisal |
Autor/a: | Otero Pereira, José Manuel |
Dirección/Titoría: | Fernández Polo, Francisco Xabier |
Centro/Departamento: | Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Facultade de Filoloxía |
Palabras chave: | MAE | Linguaxe e tecnoloxía | Sociodialectos | Hollywood | Inglés americano | Xerga | |
Data: | 2018-11-06 |
Resumo: | Mid-Atlantic English refers to a form of speaking which was popular in the first half of the 20th century mostly among Hollywood’s film stars, but also Presidents, First Ladies and renowned writers. MAE has been widely considered to have been created at Hollywood just for the new “talking pictures” to be widely understood, and that it was just a kind of mixture of General American and Received Pronunciation. As for the former, MAE provides an excellent example of how advances in technology may impact on the evolution of language. In this study, I intend to provide a through description and a critical appraisal of existing research on the history, role and nature of MAE. To this aim, three different lines of research will be pursued: a) I will trace its antecedents and evolution by analyzing the following items which influenced its origin: Stage-Speech, Good Speech, early days of radio, Newsreels and “Talkies”. I will try to characterize the role of MAE in the evolution of Hollywood’s industry and, especially, in the transition to sound films, trying to answer, among others, the following questions: In what way did this technological progress affect the language? Why did it originate in Hollywood and nor in Europe? Why and when did MAE fade away? b) I will describe its formal characteristics, mostly drawing on important work on the topic by specialists like David Crystal and William Labov, paying attention (if relevant) to the various language levels of phonetic and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, which will be scrutinized and compared with other similar English varieties. Our ultimate intention is to establish whether MAE may be characterized as a dialect, slang, jargon, a register or something else. c) Finally, by comparing MAE with other milestones in the evolution of the English language, I will try to discuss, in passing, issues related to the motivations underlying the rise and fall of a “vogue” language, which may shed some light into the present and future influence of today’s technologies on the fate of English as a Global Language |
Descrición: | Traballo Fin de Grao en Lingua e Literatura Inglesas. Curso 2018-2019 |
URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10347/23765 |