| As a quite complex and unique phenomenon in linguistic contact, code-switching (hereafter, shortened as CS) has been the focus of linguists since 1970s. Lots of researches have been done from different perspectives including sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, conversational analysis and grammatical analysis, and they have got great achievements, but they also have their own disadvantages. In the field of sociolinguistics, several scholars have done ample studies on CS, of whom the representatives are Fishman (1965), Gumperz (1982), and Myers-Scotton (1993) and so on. Fishman introduces'domain'into this field, Gumperz concludes six functions of conversational CS, which are the prime contributions to the CS researches. And Myers-Scotton's Markedness Model is an important model for accounting for speaker's social motivations in the process of CS. All of these studies indicate that researches of sociolinguistics are still at the surface level, so they cannot promulgate the whole process of CS and the factors such as language and psychology in the process of CS. And from the psycholinguistic point of view, two theoretical models stand out, that is, Clyne's Triggering Model and Giles and his associates'Speech Accommodation Theory. But till now, psycholinguists haven't presented a mature model that can interpret CS. While the conversational analysis brings the dynamics of conversation sequencing into the meaning study of CS, of which Li Wei and Peter Auer are the most authoritative ones. But it shows that the conversational analysis ignores the psychological elements, so it is somewhat subjective. The last but not least, in terms of grammatical approach, the representatives are Poplack's (1980) Free Morpheme Constraint and Equivalence Constraints and Myers-Scotton's (1993) Matrix Language Frame Model, shortened as, MLF Model. The grammatical approach looks at a specific case of switching and intends to impose a specific constraint on all languages, which inevitably causes a conflict between syntax structures.Under this condition, all of the disadvantages of the above mentioned approaches echo a more comprehensive and promising perspective, pragmatic approach. In 1999, Jef Verschueren puts forward the "choice-adaptation" theory in his new book Understanding Pragmatics, which claims that the process of using language is a choice-making process, and all the linguistic phenomena can be analyzed from the four angles of adaptability, namely, contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability and salience of adaptation process. The adaptation theory studies language use from a brand-new perspective and intends to give a better understanding of CS in literary works, to be exact, in novels.Taking Verschueren's adaptation theory as the theoretical basis, this thesis is mainly taken as a tentative study to explore the functions of English and Chinese CSs in novels from the pragmatic perspective. And it takes typical instances from Qian Zhongshu's Fortress Besieged, Wang Wensi's Been There, Done that, and Zhu Tianwen's collection of short stories, Legend for corpus to analyze this phenomenon. Through the careful and detailed study of the new English and Chinese CS corpus in novels, this thesis draws two conclusions:First, the English and Chinese CSs in novels are not in disorder; instead, it is systematic and rule-governed. Generally speaking, it serves as an effective communicative strategy for language users and it is a stylistic method for forming characters. What's more, it has the following pragmatic functions:convenience strategy, identity-establishment strategy, emphasis or explanation strategy, relationship-adjustment strategy, humor-creating strategy and avoidance strategy. Second, the overwhelming majorities of CSs fall into the noun categories. Similar to people in real life, characters in novels tend to speak more noun forms.The findings show that we can develop a better understanding of CSs in novels and enlighten language users and learners to use them properly for successful communication goals. |
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