A Pragmatic Study Of Code-switching In Cross-cultural Conversational Communication

Code-switching, the alternate use of two or more languages or language varieties in the same utterance or conversation. It is a universal yet complicated social phenomenon in monolingual, bilingual or multilingual settings. Since the 1970's, a number of linguists have launched various researches to this subject from the aspects of sociolinguistics, grammatical, conversational analysis, psychological linguistics and pragmatic approaches and great achievements have been attained.On the basis of the findings of Verschueren's linguistic adaptation theory and Yu Guodong's adaptation model, the author has further made a specific pragmatic study of the code-switching in cross-cultural conversational communication. Through the study and analysis of several typical code-switching instances in cross-cultural conversations, two conclusions are reached: Firstly, the occurrence of code-switching is influenced by many factors, such as linguistic, social and psychological factors. Generally speaking, code-switching as an effective communicative strategy is used by the communicators to meet their communicative intentions. According to the present study, it mainly shows three functions in cross-cultural conversational communication: filling lexical gap and semantic discrepancy to make the communication more convenient, helping communicators avoid social embarrassment and helping communicators fulfill their psychological needs as humor or satire, emphasis, hearer-excluding, mitigation, show-off or fashion strategy. Secondly, under monolingual, bilingual and multilingual cultural settings, code-switching reflects different features and functions in three factors of cross-cultural pragmatics (pragmalinguistics, sociopragmatics and interlanguage pragmatics), which has practical significance on the research of the positive correlation between code-switching and social development.Methodologically speaking, the present study involves descriptive, quantitative and especially qualitative method. The qualitative aspect lies in the analysis of the adaptation of the code-switching in cross-cultural conversational communication. The whole process begins with the collecting of the conversational examples, then categorizes them and observes the linguistic characteristics, finally explains reasons and explores functions of these code-switching phenomena.Above all, this thesis intends to develop a better understanding of code-switching as well as arouse language learners and users'awareness of this linguistic phenomenon and help them achieve better communication with each other.