The Adaptation Pattern Of Code-Switching In The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club is the first novel of the famous Chinese-American woman writer Amy Tan, and also her signature work. It made a great success once published. The novel presents the ups and downs of the four immigrant women’s life, and the psychological gap between their American-born daughters and themselves. It not only reflects the psychology and values of Chinese-Americans, but also expresses the deep feelings of kinship. The frequent appearance of English-Chinese code-switching is considered a key linguistic feature of this novel.As the general phenomenon in linguistic competence, Code-switching (CS) has drawn wide attention of linguists. They take approaches like sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, grammatical, conversation-analysis, etc., and come out with many related theories and research methods. The studies on The Joy Luck Club both home and abroad mainly focus on aspects of social identity, culture difference, characters and mother-daughter relationship. The one concerning English-Chinese CS phenomenon in the novel is relatively less.The author attempts to analyze the adaptability of English-Chinese CS in Amy Tan’s novel the Joy Luck Club based on the theoretical framework of Yu Guodong’s Linguistic Adaptation Model of Code-Switching (2001) under Jef Verschuren’s Linguistic Adaptation Theory (1999). The author of this thesis collects100English-Chinese CS examples in this novel as researching corpus, analyzes the adaptation pattern of CS from linguistic reality, social conventions and psychological motivations, to reveal the pragmatic functions of CS of reflecting thinking diversity, culture integration and social identity in the course of adaptation.This thesis has the following findings:1) In the process of adapting to linguistic reality, CS reflects the thinking diversity in general appellations, characteristics expressions and other terms between Chinese and western people from three aspects as conventional choice, lexical supplementation and diversity elimination.2) Through adapting to social conventions, the CS realizes the cultural respect and cultural blending from avoiding taboo and averting ambiguity in Chinese and western culture.3) By adapting to psychological motivations, CS highlights and enhances role realization, psyche presentation and national belonging pursuit from building character, intensifying mood and representing national psychology.This thesis extends the application research of CS into the novel The Joy Luck Club from the perspective of Adaptation Theory by adopting Yu Guoding’s Linguistic Adaptation Model of Code-switching. Meanwhile, this thesis tries to enhance the consciousness of cultural respect and promote cultural integration in the context of globalization. In addition, this study helps to construct self-identification and distinguish others’ social identities through the use of CS in cultural communication.