Pedantry, preoccupation, and the presentation of self : an interdisciplinary study of attitudes towards language

• Main Author: Tarsoly, E.
• Other Authors: Abondolo, D. M.
• Published: University College London (University of London) 2016
• Online Access: https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.763121

This thesis discusses attitudes towards language from a variety of perspectives. It takes as a starting point a classification of metaphoric and metonymic schemata in the discourses of language cultivation and purism in Hungarian in the 1950s. Next, the perspective zooms out to explore the rise of vernacular-language consciousness in Central and Eastern Europe. From this angle, I seek to elucidate a typology of attitudes underlying the institutionalised traditions of standard languages and language standards. In so doing, I rely on the analytical tool of anchorage: a conceptual blend which accounts for the role that awareness of the historic relatedness of language plays in shaping speakers' attitudes towards vernaculars which are to be reinterpreted as national languages. The perspective then expands further to scan the ways in which language change and the typological features of languages impinge on the evolution of poetic norms. In view of the poetic function of language, I argue that attitudes towards poetic norm are symptomatic of various postures towards language as a whole. Finally, the discussion refocuses on some of the issues raised earlier through three case studies, which reassess attitudes towards normative linguistic culture from the point of view of the individual. Each of these angles brings into focus the fine and fuzzy line which separates language-external and language-internal factors in shaping beliefs about, and attitudes towards, language. In addition to the analytical approaches mentioned so far, this project couples insights from diachronic sociolinguistics and the theory of conceptual blending. Given the variation in the types of texts under scrutiny in the four chapters, I allowed the data to determine the analytical technique. Thus, approaches from cognitive linguistics, theory of verse, discourse analysis, and basic linguistic theory were brought to bear on the discussion of linguistic material.