An Adaptive Research On Code-switching In Fu Lei’s Family Letters

The code-switching phenomenon has been paid much attention by both foreign and domestic scholars since the 1950 s and 1960 s. The pragmatic perspective, as a comprehensive one, provides a more complete and convincing explanation on code-switching studies. Fu Lei’s Family Letters is a classical work in Chinese literature and it is full of enlightening spirit and educational value. Previous researches mainly focus on its artistic thoughts and educational ideas. Besides, there are a large number of code-switching cases in this work but this linguistic feature is rarely studied. Thus, it is of great value to study code-switching phenomenon in Fu Lei’s Family Letters from the pragmatic perspective.The present study aims to give both quantitative and qualitative analyses on code-switching in Fu Lei’s Family Letters from the perspective of pragmatics based on Yu Guodong’s Adaption Model on code-switching. The quantitative analysis shows that Chinese-English code-switching constitutes the main part of the data, among which intra-sentential code-switching takes the lead. The qualitative study makes a specific analysis on how code-switching in Fu Lei’s Family Letters makes adaptation to the linguistic reality, the social conventions and the psychological motivations. The detailed analysis shows that code-switching as adaptation to the psychological motivations takes great proportion and the functions mainly include mitigation strategy, convenience strategy, and authenticity-keeping strategy. The theoretical significance of the study lies in analyzing the reasons for code-switching phenomenon in Fu Lei’s Family Letters by application of Yu Guodong’s Adaptation Model on code-switching and enriching the functions within this model based on code-switching studies in Fu Lei’s Family Letters. Besides, the practical significance lies in readers’ better understanding and appreciation of the Chinese classical literature works.