On The Mixing Of English In Hong Kong Cantonese

Language contacts lead to codeswitching between different languages. During the years Hong Kong was colonized by Britain, English, the language of the colonizers, served as the "high" or prestige language of territorial administration in government and legal affairs, while Cantonese, the primary language of the colonized, served as the "low" or vernacular language of everyday affairs. The constant contact of the two languages resulted in constant codeswitching. In the colonized social context of Hong Kong, codeswitching was realized as inserting English elements into Cantonese. This linguistic practice remains though after Hong Kong went back to china.Weinreich started the wheel of academic study on codeswitching in 1953. Since then researchers have probed into this particular linguistic phenomenon from different perspectives. Researchers such as Pennington and Luke in Hong Kong also showed great interest in codeswitching between Cantonese and English. Their researches were focused on the social-cultural factors that motivate codeswitching. Few studies have been made on the grammatical constraints on the codeswitched sentences between the two languages.The present thesis is based on the findings made by previous researchers in relevant fields of codeswitching. Rich corpora of codeswitching between Cantonese and English are collected from the soap opera Wars of the Genders, which is set within the context of modern Hong Kong. Statistic study on the corpora reveals that English elements inserted...