The Linguistic Phenomenon Of Lexical Shift Of Taiwanese Individuals Living In The Mainland: An Ethnographic Case Study

Language contact is ubiquitous in the development of human language.It may lead to the following linguistic phenomena: language borrowing,language shift,multilingual usage,language mixing and so forth.Language contact can be seen as a driving force for language evolution,as well as a corollary to it.Putonghua that is spoken in the mainland and "Guoyu" that is used in Taiwan both belong to the same language variety within a country.Nonetheless,due to globalization and the increasingly frequent contact across the strait,profound changes are taking place that cannot be ignored.By adopting sociolinguistic methods,the aim of this dissertation is to unravel the phenomenon of cross-strait lexical shift of Taiwanese individuals living in the mainland from the perspective of language contact.The main portion of this thesis consist of six ethnographic case studies,and employs discourse analysis,audio recordings,questionnaire and other data collection methods to examine the phenomenon of lexical shift in Taiwanese residents.Through oral history research methods and first-hand data,this dissertation shows the voice of Taiwanese individuals living in the mainland,and then explores and describes their life experiences and language use in detail.In addition,the contributing factors for lexical shift will be summarized.Finally,the research finds that the underlying motives for lexical shift are:(1)different social and linguistic environment across the strait;(2)the transformation learning experience and educational environment;(3)language adaptation;(4)family language policy;(5)and the influence of personal language identity.The research has arrived at the following conclusion: The linguistic choices regarding which kind of vocabulary to use made by Taiwanese individuals when they come to live in the mainland noticeably reflects their varying degree of association with a certain language or culture.According to the oral data presented in the study,no certain pattern of vocabulary use can be identified as each individual's life experience is unique.Nevertheless,as far as the vocabularies themselves areconcerned,the more strongly associated with Taiwanese “Guoyu” the words are,the less likely they are to be replaced by their Putonghua counterparts in the mainland.In other words,the phenomenon of lexical shift does exist.The aim of this study is to demonstrate the linguistic phenomenon of lexical shift among Taiwanese individuals living in the mainland,and to show the significance of lexical shift in the study of social issues.Taiwanese individuals living in the mainland are surely worth of research attention.The current study adds to the scholarly literature by providing a new perspective for the interplay between Taiwanese “Guoyu”and Chinese Putonghua,its multifarious dialects and regional variants.