Grammatical characteristics of Nonstandard English used in “John Steinbeck’s of Mice and Men”

ABSTRACT

This study deals with the grammatical characteristics of nonstandard English by the characters of John Steinbeck’s of Mice and Men (1937). Nonstandard English is a language variety spoken by certain people who are usually poor, powerless, and uneducated. This variety of English is considered as bad English because it is grammatically incorrect, such as “you was angry.” This thesis focuses on what the characteristics of nonstandard are used by the characters.

The data are grammatically nonstandard sentences. The data are collected first by looking for the words, the utterances, or the expressions of the language which are categorized as nonstandard language based on Guth’s theory. After that, the researcher reduces the data by selecting some chapters, chapter 2, 3, 4 and 5 because those chapters consist various characteristics of grammatical nonstandard English, which are not found in other chapters. The analysis itself is divided into two majors. First, the data are analyzed linguistically by discussing nonstandard grammar of the data and how is in the Standard English. Then, the data are discussed in sociolinguistically by discussing the reason and the social background why the speakers employs that dialect. Finally, the researcher finds out the frequency of each characteristic spoken by the speakers.

Based on the findings, the researcher concludes that the grammatical nonstandard characteristics used in this novel are the use of double negation, nonstandard verb form, the use of them, the use of “ain’t”, nonstandard pronoun form, improper tag question, existential “it” and “they”, nonstandard morpheme – s, reversal subject I, duplicated subject, connectives, the use of “this here”, the use of “got” and “gotta”, regularization of negative present “do” to “don’t”, the use of “ever’”. The grammatical nonstandard English mostly used are the nonstandard verb form with zero copulas (65 times). Steinbeck uses nonstandard English in his novel to convey the authentic dialect of Salinas Valley working class man. Most conversations are conveyed using simple vocabulary and short sentence structures, to convey these men’s lack of education and reliance on simple concepts because language is closely tied up with the social structure and value systems of society

Finally, the researcher suggests to the next researchers to conduct further research in pronunciation features by comparing nonstandard pronunciation between Black English Vernacular (BEV) and British English as Received Pronunciation (RP) in some novels.