الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract This study presents a linguistic analysis of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye as an Africanist discourse. The main focus is to prove that African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a variety that has a set of syntactic (system of sentence structure), semantic (system of meaning), lexical (structural organization of vocabulary items and other information) and graphological features. In other words, the study attempts to prove that AAVE is rule-governed in nature and not a ”random” set of ”errors” based on ”White English”, and consequently having a specific variety related to African Americans means having identity of their own. This view is confirmed when Morrison explained that the function of language is like that of a preacher: to make one stand up out of his seat, make him lose himself and hear himself. The worst of all possible things that could happen would be to lose language. This study also concentrates on depicting the dictatorship, oppression and depression against the Blacks through the language used, e.g. using slang words such as nigger and nasty. The approach adopted in our study is Pragma-stylistics. |