Politeness in the gendered construction of character: an analysis of dialect-use in D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Abstract

In this paper I argue that dialect-switching is capable of generating a far wider range of implicatures related to politeness than the Brown & Levinson model would suggest. Adopting a relevance-theoretical approach to politeness, I propose that differences in the significance of dialect-switches can be generated by subtle variations in the contextual assumptions a hearer or reader infers are relevant when interpreting utterances where dialect switching is evident. I consider the potential range of these contextual assumptions by outlining some of the ways in which dialect-use in English has been perceived, before going on to analyse some specific uses of dialect in Lady Chatterley’s Lover . My aim in carrying out that analysis is to show that although the literature on politeness and sociolinguistics demonstrate that dialect-use and politeness have a range of conventional associations, if a relevance-theoretical approach to politeness is applied to Lawrence’s text, it brings into view the way that he draws on these associations in order to generate alternative associations and alternative ways of constructing masculinity.