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How Language and Nation Interwine: Changes in the Language of Australian Literature from 1830 up to the Present
Císlerová, Magdalena ; Čermák, Jan (advisor) ; Willoughby, Louisa (referee) ; Horáková, Martina (referee)
While previous research has explored the relationship between national identity and language in Australia, it has not been examined on language data through history. This dissertation thus aims to trace linguistic manifestations of emerging local identity on a corpus of canonical Australian literature from 1830 up to the present. The corpus is divided into four periods based on the stages of development of postcolonial Englishes as per Schneider's Dynamic model (2007). The central hypothesis is that local identity manifests linguistically in an increased presence of the vernacular and domestic frames of reference in periods of heightened nationalism. Consequently, the nature of this study is interdisciplinary, combining linguistics with literary and cultural studies to offer a complex picture of the relationship between language and identity via a quantitative as well as qualitative analysis. The quantitative analysis concentrates on keywords, exploring both keywords generated from the corpus, using an analogically created corpus of British literature as reference, and culturally significant keywords, following Wierzbicka's (1997) theory of every culture having a set of keywords that reflect its core values. The generated lists reflect the socio-historical and cultural context, revealing common...
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