Corpus Linguistic Manifestations of Culture in Martin Chuzzlewit

Language and culture are interdisciplinary fields which cover artistic discourses, social conventions, and reflexive impacts. They are also two sides of the same coin, and thus the connection between them is inevitable. Culture is expressed through language, and language per se is affected by the culture it expresses. Hence, language can be a reference to traditions, social classes, behaviors, habits, and routines. The present study investigates the role of language in depicting cultural aspects in Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, and how ultimately culture affects and reinforces the language use in this novel. The focus of this study is, therefore, on linguistic politeness and literary dialect, as they are references to cultural expression; they reveal characters, social status, levels of education, and manners. A great deal of expressions in the novel represents the Victorian and the American cultures. This study, offers a corpus linguistic method using Wordsmith tools, to extract cultural aspects in Martin Chuzzlewit, and it brings as much as politeness markers and dialect clusters. The results show the spectrum of cultural expressions in different ways.