The Co-existence Of Europeanized Language And Traditional Language In Eileen Chang’s Novels

Eileen Chang is an important writer in the history of Chinese modern literature and seems to be unique out of the mainstream in new literature creation. Such uniqueness is reflected in her works’ creation theme, story selection and artistic technique as well as her linguistic features with both Europeanization and Chinese tradition. Taking novel languages of Eileen Chang as research object, based on the previous research of others and text analysis, the thesis makes a survey on the specific features with co-existence of Europeanized language and traditional language.The thesis is divided into five parts.In the prologue, it initially narrates the origin of research from two aspects of Eileen Chang’s creative features and Chinese Europeanization, and then it starts with the popular research on Eileen Chang and Chinese Europeanization of new literature in academic community, implementing reviews and collections as well as summarizing present achievements and gap of the research. Based on these, it begins the exploration of the way of thinking and research method in language of Eileen Chang’s novels.In chapter Ⅰ, it mainly explores the reason of developing the language style of Eileen Chang’s novels. In literature revolution of "May Fourth", those who advocate new literature spared no efforts to promote language revolution, demanding to be active in using and copying western literature whether in writing, translation or using the grammar, which made Chinese Europeanization be a powerful trend of social thought. Derived from such typical language background, it is no doubt that her creation must be influenced by Europeanized language. Born from a declined feudal family, she went to family school learning knowledge. Therefore, she acquired the essence of traditional cultures. Later, she was sent to a church school by her mother who tended to learn fashionable things. Then she had the chance of obtaining complete western education all the time. As for Eileen Chang, whether from her time or her family, it’s certain that she has witnessed the culture shock. Therefore, "uneven comparison" has been her insistence of artistic ideas.In chapter Ⅱ, it makes careful survey on Europeanization of language in Eileen Chang’s novels. Initially, it simply narrates the reasons, presentation and judgment basis in Chinese Europeanization. Then, it makes specific analysis on the level of vocabulary and morphology. The Europeanization of vocabulary is shown as follows:1. More new vocabularies are used, especially the transliteration words. In addition, they are used with Europeanized affixes;2. Europeanized function words are frequently used. The words including "and", "or" and auxiliary words like"地""着""们""的" in Chinese;3. Numeral phrases like "an item" or "a kind" with the indefinite article of English frequently appeared in her novels. The Europeanization of morphology is shown as follows:emphasizing the subject, modifier seeming complex and tediously long, having the common format of same objects and same verbs, extensive usage of passive sentence patterns, the descriptive sentence changing to the judgment sentence with "be+adjective" sentence structure, having complicated complex embedding structure, having indispensable connective elements of compound sentences, changing of sentence order, the application of explanatory supplements.In Chapter Ⅲ, it makes careful survey on traditional language in Eileen Chang’s novels. The language of Eileen Chang’s novels is known for its acquisition of the essence of old language. Such authentic Chinese is from classics of Chinese literature, which can be shown with remaining ancient Chinese vocabulary, quotation of idioms and poems and application of short sentences; On the other hand, it has native expression of languages with thick folk customs, which includes many dialect words of Shanghai and Anhui and slang words. In the application of traditional languages, Eileen Chang was influenced a lot by the Dream of Red Mansion.In Chapter Ⅳ, it is the concluding part, which simply summarizes overall feature of language in Eileen Chang’s novels. It has integration of ancient and modern culture as well as Chinese and western literature, which seems contradict but unity as well. She makes the best use of the tone of western modern culture and the essence of Chinese traditional culture. In addition, the thesis also reflects its regrets and limits in research and hopes to provide some references for the following research on literature language of Eileen Chang’s novels.