Lennie's language development in John Teinbeck's of Mice and Men

Ling, Thio Jau (1991) Lennie's language development in John Teinbeck's of Mice and Men. Bachelor thesis, Petra Christian University.

Abstract

Lennie, in the novel of Of Mice and Men, is described as a mentally handicapped person. The way he does and sees things refers to that of simple child-like manner eventhough his simplicity as a mentally handicapped person is not reflected in his use of sentence patterns. His use of sentence patterns involves all of the pat-terns existing in aduIt-language. He can perform the pat-terns of simple sentences, compound sentences, complex sen-tences, and compound-complex sentences. The performance of Lennie's simple sentences in stage I is greater than that in stage II and III. This pattern be-comes less and less from stage I to stage II and from stage II to stage III. Also, in stage III, the reduction of this pattern is followed by the increase in other sentence pat-terns which are more complicated. And his language perform-ance in stage III is better structurally than that in stage I. Besides, the sentences in stage III are relatively longer than those in stage I. Finally, it can be concluded that Lennie's language develops.

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