Sangeeta Mukherjee1 & Devi Archana Mohanty2
1Senior Assistant Professor, VIT University, Tamil Nadu, India. Orcid: 0000-0002-5488-2876. Email: sangeetamukherjee70@gmail.com
2Assistant Professor, NIET, Greater Noida, India. ORCID: 0000-0001-7103-7079. Email: devi1archana@gmail.com
Volume 12, Number 2, April-June, 2020 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n2.03
Abstract
Communicative strategies like code-switching and code-mixing have interested researchers the world over. These strategies have traversed from real life situations to creative writings to social networking domains and are dominant in bilingual or multi-lingual societies for multifarious reasons. While majority of the research was conducted in the spoken form from the real-life contexts, a few were directed towards the written forms in literary genres and computer-mediated communication. However, a significant gap becomes noticeable and needs to be explored in Indian English fiction where creative writers have dexterously used these communicative strategies. Keeping the above in mind, the present paper attempts to analyze the role of these strategies in indigenous interpersonal communicative contexts in Indian English fiction. The text chosen for this purpose is Arundhati Roy’s TheGod o Small Things and the analysis is based on the grammatical and pragmatic explanation of indigenous words which mostly belong to the area of interpersonal communication. The study shows how the author has skillfully used these strategies to unravel the indigenous cultural and social customs and mindset of the people within a particular indigenous community as well as the role-relationship between the interlocutors in a particular communicative context.
Keywords: Code-switching, code-mixing, code-retention, interpersonal communicative context, pragmatic markers.