Registros de lengua en la comedia de menandroanálisis desde una perspectiva sociolingüística

Resum

A linguistic register is the set of linguistic features that the author chooses depending on his intention and the listener. It is, thus, an author's choice, a linguistic variation selected in order to achieve the best communicative effectiveness according to the social context. The modern study of registers was started by Malinowsky in 1923 as he realised that it was impossible to understand a culture without taking into account the contexts of situation in which their speakers express themselves. In this study we seek to analyse registers across Menander comedies described for both linguistic features and situational context. Although, currently, dialectal variety is the most studied in the field of sociolinguistics, we have focused on the differences associated with the situation and context. The work of Menander, preceding of Roman comedy and influential in the development of the Western one, provided multiple acts of speech that have been analysed with methodological techniques also applicable to spoken and current languages. 2. Aims " Distinguish between the terms register and style. " Identify registers described for a shared situational framework in Menander work. " Analyse linguistic features associated with each register as a means of identification. " Match linguistic characteristics and literary situational characteristics up. " Provide a quantitative and qualitative comparison for Menander and Aristophanes registers. " Analyse other sociolinguistic issues related to the impact on the listener. 3. Methodology We have examined Menander corpus following Biber and Conrad (2009) method -a very uniform process-: situational analysis, linguistic analysis at all levels and functional associations between them. It is a quantitative and comparative methodology: a register is not distinguished because of their distinctive linguistic features but because they are more or less common in the first register than in the second one. Furthermore, in the field of our research, the most conclusive results are achieved through comparing the registers to themselves. This is the reason why we offer a comparative approach that let us clearly see the differences and similarities between them. 4. Conclusions The use of language is highly determined by external factors and it depends on the effectiveness with regard to the listener. The choice of tense, aspect or any linguistic feature is never arbitrary as it is related to communicative purposes and determined by the context. Being aware of the long tradition of understanding the language as an abstract concept, the new challenge is to study it as a tool of social interaction. In our work we have not described the language but examined its use so as to know how Menander attained the communicative effectiveness with his audience. The main element has been the text itself and the literary situation. Nowadays, regarding ancient Greek texts, linguistic research can not be limited to a simple positivist description of features. The latest advances in the fields of sociolinguistics and text analysis have to be taken into account. Teaching a language involves analysing its varieties. It can not be said that a language is known without entering into the field of linguistic registers.