Language Choice And Cultural Identity Construction-A Study Of Codeswitching In The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan,as one of the best-known American writers of Asian ancestry,has earned a well-deserved place among American fiction writers for the creation of engaging Chinese and immigrant Asian-American characters,and she has illuminated brilliantly and sensitively a distinctive and colorful aspect of the American experience.With The Joy Luck Club,Amy Tan has squeezed successfully into the mainstream cultural circles of America.Critical commentary on this novel is highly complimentary.Nowadays it has achieved the status of classic work in American literature.With the theories of pragmatics and sociolinguistics,this thesis intends to explore the construction of cultural identity of the JLC mothers.According to the Adaptation Theory,linguistic choices are generated in the correlation of mental,social and physical worlds,and the language users may make adaptive choices at various levels in order to reach their communicative goals.As a specific instance of linguistic choice, codeswitching is the realization of the adaptation to various contextual factors which can be categorized into three types,i.e.the linguistic reality,the social conventions and the psychological motivations.By the theory of Markedness Model,a speaker's linguistic choice is regarded as a rational act to negotiate the best set of rights and obligations, made with the goal to optimize through a careful cost-benefit analysis.With the unceasingly quickened pace of globalization,cultural identity has become the increasingly focus of various fields' research.The Joy Luck Club embodies the theme of pursuing identity by Chinese American with blurry identity in Western mainstream discourse.Heideggar holds "Language is the home of being".To Gadamer,human being can comprehend existence only with the help of language and human is intrinsically lingual.Consequently language is the most essential factor for the construction of cultural identity.It is out of this consideration that the author will annotate the establishment of the Chinese American cultural identity with double cultural backgrounds from the angle of language.This thesis comprises six chapters.An introduction about Amy Tan and The Joy Luck Club,the identity research status quo on the novel from the perspective of language and the significance of identity research from this perspective are presented in Chapter One.Chapter Two introduces the theoretical framework of the paper.The main body of this thesis,i.e.from Chapter Three to Chapter Five,consists of three parts:a description of the language use in the novel,an analysis of the maternal codeswitching from the perspective of the linguistic adaptation and that of the maternal language choice by the Markedness Model.A conclusion of this thesis is given in the last chapter.