Psycholinguistic Motivations for Bilingual Code-Switching in Amy Tan’s Chinese American Writings
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Abstract
The article is the attempt at the psycholinguistic investigation of code-switching (alternation between English and Chinese) specificity in Amy Tan’s Chinese American writings. The study of code-switching is a serious concern today because more and more people on the planet are becoming bilingual/multilingual. Besides, the approaches to the scientific understanding of the phenomenon have recently changed: if previously the alternation between two or more languages was regarded as a manifestation of insufficient linguistic competence of a speaker, leading to loss of language purity, today most linguists consider code-switching as a difficult, and somewhat organized and controlled process, which is a natural product of two language systems interaction. It is also relevant to develop new approaches to the study of fictional bilingualism, thus enriching the studies of national literatures by providing them with transdialogical meaning. Psycholinguistics opens new vistas in researching code-switching within a bicultural and bilingual literary text, as in the context of creative writing, psycholinguistic motivations for code-switching act as an important means of image creation. Code-switching in Amy Tan’s novels occurs in two levels. The activation of the Chinese language in the form of transcribed Chinese words and phrases relates to their frequency of use, availability, or cultural untranslatability. Such code-switching fits the syntax of the utterance, is conceptually motivated, and is an integral part of the Chinese American image creation. Another level of code-switching attributes to the inhibition of the English language – there is an indication in the English-language text that the character has completely switched to Chinese. The analysis of code-switching allows revealing its psycholinguistic motivations through unveiling emotional states of the characters. Based on the theoretical and empirical findings of the psycholinguistics of bilingualism, we conclude that there is considerable overlap between the psycholinguistic motivations of code-switching in spoken and written discourse.
How to Cite
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Amy Tan; Chinese language; Chinese American literature; psycholinguistics; bilingualism; code-switching
Primary sources
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