The Language of Lucy Steele

The Language of Lucy Steele

The Language of Lucy Steele: A Sociolinguistic Study
The character of Lucy Steele from Sense and Sensibility is primarily motivated by a singular desire: to gain as much wealth and social standing from marriage as possible. She is from the lower middle class and has relations that are above her social status by birth. Lucy understands that she must use these relations and their connections to her advantage. In the process of slithering her way up the social ladder, Lucy keeps a high-class outward appearance; however, she has a very hard time hiding her lack of formal education in her written and spoken language. Lucy finds it hard to shake the usage of contractions that are not determined to be proper, and makes other grammatical errors quite frequently. Outside of having bad grammar in certain aspects, Lucy often relies on what she has determined to be appropriate idioms and phrases that in reality are cliché. The language of Lucy Steele is extremely affected by sociolinguistic factors. Her lack of education is apparent in the grammatical errors and use of contractions while the prominence of social clichés is a result of trying to fit in with the upper class. All in all, Lucy’s language servers as a perfect metaphor for a young lady with little education who tries as hard as she can to put on airs of sophistication up to, and just past, the point of acceptability.
Sociolinguistically speaking, Lucy is under the influence of social prestige, communication accommodation theory, and politeness theory. Prestige relates to the perceived social value of certain linguistic features such as phonological, lexical, and syntactic variations. Specifically, Lucy is feeling the pressure from overt prestige when she tries to tailor her language to reflect a more socially valued variety. The other side of prestige is what causes her bad grammar to receive such scrutiny from the characters of higher social standing (Mestherie et al. 89). Lucy’s educational and...

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