Code-Switching English-French in the Novel Petite Anglaise

Abstract

Code-switching has become a common language phenomenon that is widely used by each speaker who perceives and practices two or more languages in their daily lives. This common language phenomenon is looked up upon as the exchange of languages into other languages by speakers. This research aimed to discover the use of code-switching and the communicative functions of French as the second language used in an English novel entitled Petite Anglaise written by Catherine Sanderson. Moreover, this research involved analyzing the use of code-switching between English and French from all of the 34 chapters contained in the novel. The researchers have chosen the theoretical framework pioneered by Poplack (1980) to identify the three types of code-switching, namely tag code-switching, intrasentential code-switching and intersentential code-switching. Besides, this research also demonstrates the communicative functions of language, especially French, based on the theoretical framework presented by Halliday (1973). The findings show that each French word that was part of the code-switching phenomenon used by the author has the language communicative functions. Furthermore, based on the data analysis, each of the French words has played an important role to facilitate the author's messages through the dialogues of every character involved. The results of this research are also expected to benefit readers especially for those who are interested in French languages. This is because this research demonstrates the ability of codeswitching to assist in the acquisition of the foreign language even though through non-academic materials including the novel.