Linguistic roles of surrogate language in the select literary texts

Abstract

Language has verbal and nonverbal components and both of them complement each other in our daily communication. The former exists in spoken form and the latter uses body movement, musical instruments and sign language to convey meaning. Surrogate language is synonymous with nonverbal communication. This paper investigates the linguistic roles of surrogate language in the select literary texts. The study explores different media of surrogate language and states the roles of surrogate language in literary texts. This study adopts Katz, Blumler and Gurevitch’s Uses and Gratifications Theory. This theory states that audience use the mass media for their own purposes such as information, entertainment, messages, announcements and advertisements. The researcher selected seven literary texts using non-probability sampling method with particular reference to purposive sampling. The researcher made use of both primary and secondary sources such as textbooks, journal articles, theses and dictionaries. The author read, selected and jotted down surrogate language for easy presentation and analysis. It has been found out that in surrogate language, blind people can hear the sounds of the musical instruments and understand, deaf people can see the eye contacts of the speakers without bothering about the speech.