Non-Standard language in Zadie Smith's white Teeth : the novel and its TV adaptation

• Autor(a) principal: Ntoya, Mansisa
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/36665
• topic: Smith, Zadie, 1975-.... White teeth; Smith, Zadie, 1975-.... White teeth - Adaptações televisivas; Língua inglesa - Variação linguística; Linguagem - Na literatura; Linguagem - No cinema; Teses de mestrado - 2018; Domínio/Área Científica::Humanidades::Línguas e Literaturas

Novels are mostly written in standard language, but they can also resort to non-standard linguistic varieties, for different purposes. This rhetorical strategy has been theorized, in particular by Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), and has a long tradition of use in literature in English. It dates back to at least the fourteenth century, with Chaucer, and does not seem to disappear. Furthermore, in more recent times language variation has been imported into audio-visual fiction, where the resource to a multiplicity of English(es) beyond the standard is obvious. My dissertation focusses on White Teeth, Zadie Smith’s first novel, as it is a very good example of a recent novel which deals with a multiplicity of different varieties of English and which has also been adapted for television. It therefore provides a particularly interesting corpus for a contrastive analysis on the use of non-standard English in written and audio-visual fiction, a perspective from which it has not been considered in the literature so far. Ever since its publication, White Teeth has been the object of interest to both the general reading public and academics. Several essays in the domain of English Literary Studies have been produced, and some of them considered microlinguistic aspects as well. However, no study had so far tried a contrastive analysis between the literary text and the television adaptation, which is the object of this dissertation. The first goal of this dissertation is to identify the characteristics of non-standard English(es) used in the novel and in its television adaptation. Furthermore, attention will be directed to the means used to represent non-standard speech, including metalanguage, in both the novel and the television adaptation. The results of the study are summed up in the conclusion.