Hui Alley Pidgin English:Socio-cultural Theory

Hui Alley Pidgin English, which belongs to a contact language of sociolinguistics, originates from the conversation between foreign tourists and shop owners during their frequent transactions, with its vocabulary from the superstate language-English and grammatical structure and phonological rules transferred from the substrate language-Chinese. More importantly, it embodies the vast usage of deictic gesture and the Muslim culture. This thesis aims to generalize the holistic features of Hui Alley Pidgin English and determine what kind of language it belongs to. In order to find out the answers, we have put forward the Defective Interaction Theory within the background of socio-cultural theory. Two hypotheses are proposed based on socio-cultural theory and defective interaction theory:1. The developmental path of Hui Alley Pidgin English will be from a combination of verbal and nonverbal to dominantly verbal, and the verbal path will be words/fragmentsâ†'chunksâ†'sentences.2. Hui Alley Pidgin English will be fossilized because of the defective nature of the language input shop owners receive and the monolithic nature of their business communication.The two hypotheses are verified upon a longitudinal case study, interviews and observations. The results show that Hui Alley Pidgin English is dominated by chunks and non-verbal communication plays a supplementary role. Furthermore, the development of Hui Alley English demonstrates there are generally no changes in phonetics, vocabulary or grammar. Thus, we conclude that Hui Alley Pidgin English is fossilized.Here are seven parts in this thesis. The first part is to introduce some significant concept of theories and the topic to be discussed; the second chapter is the literature review, which mainly deals with World English, English Varieties, Pidgin, Creole as well as the definition of Hui Alley Pidgin English; Chapter Three is theoretical framework, which focuses on Bakhtin's theories and Defective Interaction Theory; Chapter Four describes the methodology applied in this research; The fifth part of this thesis is a case study analyzed from phonetics, vocabulary and grammar; the sixth part is of great importance to this thesis, which analyzes Hui Alley Pidgin English in detail, generalizes the features form comprehensive data of five shop owners and presents the features of Foreigner Talk. The last part is the conclusion.