Evoke The Flexibility Of Chinese

The words from scholar Bai Xiangyong, "Hundreds years history of vernacular Chinese has been suffering the inner degeneration and destruction by foreign languages", vividly describe the contemporary scholars'concerns and worries about the crisis that the native tongue faces. The double impact from native and non-native language have exerted great influence on the purity of vernacular Chinese, which has degenerated into the colloquial and redundant speech without special pleasing charm and connotation. The writer, Jia Pingwa, has made many attempts to enrich, evoke the Chinese inner flexibility and rescue it from crisis. On one hand, he adopts and maintains the essences of ancient Chinese to enrich the vernacular with the typical traditional spirit. On the other hand, he actively studies and develops the modern Chinese to find out the solutions.This dissertation revolves around the discussion of discourse strategies in the writer Jia Pingwa's full-length novels from the perspective of analyses on his evoking Chinese inner flexibility. This topic has been touched by some researchers occasionally but lacks the systematic study. On the basis of continuous writing and under the guidance of his Chinese spontaneous awareness, Jia Pingwa mainly adopts three kinds of discourse strategies to achieve the goal of evoking flexibility.Strategy 1. Maintain the ancient literati's languages. Jia Pingwa melts essences of literary heritage from the classical Chinese into his own writings to form his style with the charm of classical Chinese.Strategy 2. Borrow the rural colloquial expressions. He insists in borrowing the idiomatic local dialects from the mass into his creation and has formed the unique discourse with the intense features of residents' languages in County Shang. His words lively describe the lives in the County Shang and present the cultural spirit of that place.Stragety 3. Adopt the urban ordinary people's utterances. His writing absorbs the popular utterances among the mass to represent the lower-class people's lives and mentalities among the clashes between the tradition and the modernity.Jia Pingwa skillfully manipulates three discourse systems, which are ancient literati's languages, rural colloquial expressions and urban ordinary people's utterances, to create the unique languages in his works. By building the bridges among the multi-discourses, he describes deeply and flatly the physical and mental states of contemporary Chinese among the clashes between the tradition and the modernity. His persistent pursuit of literary achievements comes from his deep love in Chinese traditional culture and perception of the Chinese characters as well as his recognition of rule of mother tongue. He keeps his distance from the vulgar popular expressions and carries out his aesthetic principles, which emphasizes the unity and simplicity in the complexity as well as the grace in the inelegancy. He always maintains the clear understand and strong consciousness in the construction of literary discourse. His languages are smooth and natural with the features of being concise, fresh, simple and idiomatic. His persistent creation makes contribution to evoke the flexibility of Chinese.