Code-switching In Mandarin-english Bilinguals

This paper focuses on Mandarin-English code-switching in bilinguals of America,primarily on the author’s classmates and their families, the Chinese American studentsfrom elementary school and some relative materials collected in other situations.Based on Gumperz and Appeal’s functional category of code-switching, thispaper summarizes10functions of Mandarin-English code-switching by adding newitems: addressee specification, quotation, phatic function, interjection, emphasis,explanation, confirmation, correction, expressive function, humor. Contrary to theprevious research that the frequency of adults’ code-switching is getting less as theirages go up, this paper finds out that adults’ capacity of code-switching is not losing,but instead that the behavior of code-switching implies their ability of speaking twolanguages. In addition, adults and children do not have many differences regarding onthe functions of code-switching, except of the phatic function and humor notappearing in children’s code-switching.In the fourth chapter, this paper applies Conversational Analysis (CA) approachto examine the bilinguals’ code switching. CA indicates that bilingual speakers repairtheir conversation and meet the demand by using code-switching. This chapter alsointroduces Myers-Scotton’s Markedness theory to explain that the bilingual speakersreestablish rights-obligations by switching to another language. In addition, Comparedwith monolingual Chinese and English corpora, in the mixed corpus there aresyntactic variations: variation in dependency distances and word-order variation independency direction. Mixed dependencies present longer dependency distances thanmonolingual ones, which match the Markedness theory, that is marked code-switchingrequires more efforts.What’s more, this paper discusses the factors that influence code-switching,which indicates that adults and children are mainly impacted by social and psychological factors.