A Study Of Code-switching In Lawrence's Novels From The Perspective Of The Adaptation Theory

In recent years, with the fast footsteps of economic and cultural globalization, people's contact with each other becomes more and more frequent. As one of the consequences of language contact, code-switching has attracted extensive attention from the academia. Since the early 1960s, scholars in western countries have noticed this language phenomenon and carried out abundant researches in various fields. After 40 years'development, only in the field of linguistics there have formed five systematic research approaches: the grammatical, sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, conversational analysis and the pragmatic approach. It is not until the late 1980s that researchers at home began to focus on the code-switching phenomenon and make some achievements. But most of their researches are limited within the introduction and discussion of the existing theories or theoretical models. While practical studies are far from enough. Considering this, we aim to carry out a study of code-switching in literary works with the adaptation theory from a pragmatic perspective so as to probe into the dynamics and functionality of this phenomenon.The adaptation theory proposed by Verschueren (1999) describes people's using language as a process of constantly making choices and realizing adaptation. It also points out that the influential factors include such aspects as physical, social, cultural and cognitive, etc. Based on the adaptation theory, Chinese scholar Yu (2001) has successfully made his practical study on Chinese/English code-switching and presents the adaptation model. Under Yu's adaptation model, this research will collect data from Lawrence's three famous novels: Sons and Lovers, Lady Chatterly's Lover and Women in love, integrate both qualitative and quantitative methodology, probe into the various types of code-switching phenomena from three aspects, i.e. the linguistic reality, social conventions and psychological motivations so as to display the dynamic process of adaptation as well as the various functions realized in the novels.The result of the present study shows that in order to achieve certain communicative goals, the characters may switch their codes in various forms as adaptation to the linguistic, social, cultural or psychological factors for successful communications. The characters'code-switching has become a kind of communicative strategy which plays different roles under different circumstances. The study of code-switching phenomenon in the three novels is expected to provide some help for people to make more successful communications in their daily life, enrich the existing Lawrence studies as well as code-switching studies and practice the adaptation theory so as to contribute to the development of both theoretical and practical researches.