An Analysis Of My Country And My People From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Adaptation Theory was proposed by linguist Jef Verschueren in UnderstandingPragmatics, This theory regards pragmatics as a general functional perspective onlanguage and manages to explain how the language users successfully make persistentlinguistic choices in linguistic communication. My Country and My people is a worldrenowned English work written by Yutang Lin in1936and it introduced the Chinesecharacter, Chinese mind, Chinese political, social, and literary life and so on in Chinaand was seen as the best book to understand Chinese as soon as it appeared in westernworld.That My Country and My People got its popularity must have profound reasons.This paper mainly makes a whole analysis of this work under the principle ofAdaptation Theory and tries to research factors which affect the process of languagechoice making during the formation of this work.This thesis consists of an introduction, the main body and a conclusion. Its maincontents are as follows:The first part is introduction, which mainly makes a brief summary of theprevious research of the Adaptation Theory, and then points out the research status ofMy Country and My people as well as its author Yutang Lin.The second part is the main body, which is made up of five chapters:Chapter One mainly introduces the theoretical framework, which is a summaryof basic conceptions in Adaptation Theory, three properties of language and fouraspects of adaptation. These three aspects will be applied to analyse Yutang Lin’s MyCountry and My people.Chapter Two concentrates on analysis of My Country and My People from theperspective of social world, which composes one aspect of communicative contextmentioned in Adaptation Theory. Social world is a broad sense and five factors insocial world will be used to discuss. They are adaptation to east and west culture,education level, gender difference, religion and world situation in this chapter.Chapter Three studies My Country and My People from the perspective ofphysical world. Time, space and utterer are three factors in physical world. HowYutang Lin adapted to the physical world to write My Country and My People will be discussed.Chapter Four focuses this work from the perspective of mental world; mentalworld is also a significant aspect in communicative context in Adaptation Theory.Reader’s mental world is discussed from adaptation to reader’s reading habit andinterest, while writer’s mental world consists of adaptation to writer’s personality,emotions, humor and duty.Chapter Five researches My Country and My People from the perspective oflinguistic context. This context is another context in Adaptation Theory comparedwith communicative context; its discussion concludes adaptation to contextualcohesion, intertextuality and sequencing.The last part is conclusion, which makes a summary to the preceding critique,and points out the main purpose of this thesis. My Country and My People is animportant literary work in modern Chinese history. Under the analysis from theperspective of Adaptation Theory, the formation process of this work will be clarifiedand the great application ability of Adaptation Theory will also be further manifested.