SOCILINGUISTC USE OF THE PASSIVE IN TWO 19TH CENTURY BRITISH NOVELS

Abstract

This article is inspired by our extensive reaserch of the passive construction combined with consideration for the issues related to the social postion of women. The resulting sociolinguistic research is based on the hypothesis that the passive construction, as a linguistic construction that expresses passivity, as its name implies, as opposed to actitivity and dynamism, will be more frequently used in the language of women since historically their position in a society have been passive and marginalized. Also, the feminine principle have been described and defined as the passive, as opposed to the male/masculine principle that has been defined as active and productive by many famous scholars and philosophers as well as in many cultural traditions (Kujundžić, 2021). In order to test this hypothesis, we decided to compare the frequency of the passive use in two British 19th-century novels written by a female and a male author respectively. As a female author we chose Jane Austen, as the first widely popular female British author, and her novel “Pride and Prejudice”, while as her male counterpart we chose William Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” since they are both set within the same historical period – Napoleonic Wars, and they both deal with similar societal issues.