Analysis Of Address Forms In The Joy Luck Club In The Light Of Contextual Adaptability

Address forms are the important linguistic phenomenon on how to address others so as to promote the communication in daily life. Address forms indicate the first language source of the interlocutors as well as the major source in interpersonal communication, so they exert great influence on literary works and can not be belittled. Verschueren(1999) asserts that the linguistic choice-making is actually the process of adaptation to the context. Thus contextual adaptability can effectively assist interlocutors to understand the process of choice-making. Until now, scholars abroad have taken different approaches to the study of address from diverse aspects. Scholars in China have mainly investigated address forms ranging from the classification to the rules embodied in them. However, currently there is still a dearth of researches on the address forms by combining the contextual adaptation theory. In addition, previous researches are confined to the pure analysis of address forms, but the relevant studies on the feature and regularities for the use of address forms in the literary works are scant. Therefore, this paper attempts to explore the pragmatic function of address forms in the literary work The Joy Luck Club by incorporating Verschueren’s(1999) contextual adaptation theory, which aims at leading to a better understanding of address forms in English, further revealing the pragmatic meaning embodied in address forms and providing a deep linguistic interpretation of the figure images in the novel.On the basis of contextual adaptability, the thesis, taking The Joy Luck Club as data source, analyzes how the mental, social and physical world influence the choice of the address forms used by Lindo with the classification of address by Friederike Braun(1988). The thesis combines both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The address forms used by Lindo will be labeled, classified and counted. Then we will conduct an analysis of the distribution of the address forms.The use of address forms in The Joy Luck Club serves as a significant way to better understanding language meaning. Through the research, the study comes to the following conclusions: first, the choice-making of address forms is the process of adaptation to social world, mental world and physical world of Lindo in The Joy Luck Club. The use of address forms adapts to the social settings and culture of the social world. The kinship terms adopted by Lindo to address the elder generation and the same generation account for higher proportion; as for the mental world, the employment of address forms reveals the process of adaptation to intentions, personality and so forth. The percentage of zero form used by Lindo to address the elder generation is relatively large, and the second person pronoun adopted by Lindo to designate the younger generation takes a large proportion of the total number of address forms; besides, the temporal reference and spatial reference in the physical world also impact the choices of address forms in communication. Second, the study not only provides a new perspective for studying address forms, but also proves further that the choice of address is closely associated with contextual adaptation. It is feasible to apply the theory into the analysis of address forms. At last, it enriches the application of contextual adaptation theory. What’s more, it can facilitate people better understanding address forms and improve their ability to analyze and appreciate the literary works.