An Analysis Of The Code-switching In The Joy Luck Club Based On The Adaption Model

Code-switching refers to a kind of linguistic phenomenon in which two or more than two languages or language varieties are alternatively used in written or oral texts.Because of the diversity of forms,constraints by linguistic factors,social and cultural factors and psychological motivations,code-switching has piqued many interests of scholars of sociolinguistics,syntax,psycholinguistics,and pragmatics.They all put forward their understandings towards code-switching from their own perspectives.However,those researchers only studied the code-switching from their single perspectives,without comprehensively and synthetically considering the factors likely affecting the code-switching from other perspectives.In light of this,inspired by Verschureen’s Linguistic Adaptation theory,Yu Guodong channeled his energy to propose the Adaption Model for code-switching that integrates the factors of linguistic reality,social culture,and cognition,which plays an important role in understanding and analyzing code-switching.The Joy Luck Club is written by Chinese American Amy Tan.Based on Chinese culture and American culture,this work mainly tells about the contradictions,conflicts and final reconciliations among four pairs of mothers and daughters.There are a multitude of code-switching in the novel owing to some reasons such as the immigrant identity and different attitudes of mothers and daughters towards Chinese and American culture.Therefore,through the study of the linguistic phenomenon—code-switching in the text,it is great beneficial to analyze the text and profoundly understand the social and cultural factors and thematic significance in the text embedded in the linguistic level.However,up to now,most scholars have tried their best to dig out the language from the external social and cultural factors while few researchers have made a tentative try in analyzing the external social and cultural factors in this novel from the internal linguistic factors.Hence,based on Yu’s Adaption Model for code-switching,taking the code-switching in The Joy Luck Club as corpus and adopting the methodology of combination of statistics and text analysis,this thesis is aimed to study the forms and the code-switching in The Joy Luck Club so as to provide a guidance for analyzing the social and cultural factors and related thematic significance in this novel.After analysis,firstly,it finds out that the code-switching in The Joy Luck Club can be categorized into different forms in terms of different codes and structures.Secondly,the code-switching in The Joy Luck Club is motivated by adaption to linguistic reality,social and cultural conventions and psychological factors.Adaption to linguistic reality includes adaption to different kinship terms,social appellations,naming entity,discourse particles and others such as measurement units.Adaption to social and cultural conventions is in fact the adaption to different social conventions,cultural values and religious elements.The code-switching motivated by adaption to psychological factors is for expressing mood,widening or narrowing the mental distance between the speakers and the hearers,pursuing linguistic convenience and validity and pursuing national identity.This thesis is designed to explore the reasons of code-switching in the corpus from the perspectives of language,society,culture and psychology which provides readers with a new perspective to understand The Joy Luck Club,and which is conducive for people to deepen their understandings of code-switching,and more importantly could testify the explanatory power of Yu’s Adaptation Model for code-switching.