A Study Of Code-Switching In Chinese Pop Songs From The Perspective Of The Adaptation Theory

In recent years, with the fast footsteps of economic and cultural globalization, people's contact with each other becomes more and more frequent. As one of the consequences of language contact, code-switching has attracted extensive attention from the academia. Since the early 1960s, scholars in western countries have noticed this language phenomenon and carried out abundant researches in various fields. After 50 years' development, only in the field of linguistics there have formed five systematic research approaches:the grammatical, sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, conversational analysis and the pragmatic approach. It is not until the late 1980s that researchers at home began to focus on the code-switching phenomenon and make some achievements. But most of their researches are limited within the introduction and discussion of the existing theories or theoretical models. While practical studies are far from enough. Considering this, we aim to carry out a study of code-switching in Chinese pop songs with the adaptation theory so as to probe into the dynamics and functionality of this phenomenon.The adaptation theory proposed by Verschueren (1999) describes people's using language as a process of constantly making choices and realizing adaptation. It also points out that the influential factors include such aspects as physical, social, cultural and cognitive, etc. Based on the adaptation theory, Chinese scholar Yu(2001)has successfully made his practical study on Chinese/English code-switching and presents the adaptation model. Under Verschueren's adaptation theory, this research will collect data from 273 Chinese pop songs, integrate both qualitative and quantitative methodology, and probe into the various types of code-switching phenomena from three aspects, i.e. the linguistic reality, social conventions and psychological motivations so as to display the dynamic process of adaptation as well as the various functions realized in the Chinese pop songs. The result of the present study shows that in order to achieve certain goals, the song writers may switch their codes in various forms as adaptation to the linguistic, social, cultural or psychological factors for successful popularity among audiences. The characters'code-switching has become a kind of indirect face-to-face communicative strategy which plays different roles under different circumstances. The study of code-switching phenomenon in the 273 Chinese pop songs is expected to provide more help for people to make more successful communications in their daily life, enrich the existing pop music and code-switching studies as well as practice the adaptation theory so as to contribute to the development of both theoretical and practical researches.