Motivations For Code-Switching On Campus

In modern life, as the means of communication are developed, languages or varieties are getting in closer contact with each other than ever before. In bilingual or multilingual communities, code-switching (CS) is a frequent linguistic phenomenon of significant academic concern. This thesis is a preliminary endeavor to probe into the CS phenomenon in the speech community of university campus, with a focus on revealing the motivations for code-switching on campus.To start with, the thesis removes the barriers set up by CS terminological disputes through a redefinition and clarification of CS-related terms adopted in this thesis including the definition of code and code-switching, the difference and relationship between CS and code-mixing, CS and borrowing, CS and diglossia, CS and bilingualism, and finally the definition of motivation and CS motivation. After eliminating the vagueness in terminology for this thesis, the campus background against which this research is conducted is outlined. In this regard, linguistic situation on campus and out of campus is analyzed. The introduction to this thesis concludes that campus satisfies the prerequisites for code-switching occurrence and is a natural location for the study of CS.Afterwards, the thesis embarks on literature review, in which achievements in western countries and researches in China are summarized, laying stress on the current theoretical frameworks in research of CS motivations, including Gumperz's situational CS & metaphorical CS dichotomy, Section's markedness model, Giles' speech accommodation theory, and Fishman's domain theory. Nowadays western CS researchers are engaged in the field studies in some particular speech communities and collecting first-hand data, based on which they can make some breakthrough in theory or in practice. And domestic linguists such as 何自然 have done much work in introducing western achievements in the field of CS, but few of them study Chinese/English CS or PTH/dialect CS in China as data, let alone thestudy of first-hand campus CS data in China. This paper presents simply first-hand data collected on campus and aims at revealing campus CS motivations by drawing on the first-hand data and the above western theories as well as making some breakthrough in CS study at least in practice.This study is a case study, since through a focused study of the CS phenomenon, a deeper understanding of the fundamental motivations for campus CS may be obtained. The natural language data were mainly collected from Central China Normal University (CCNU), where the author studies and lives. In this thesis the author has argued that campus people code-switch out of certain motivations. She has supported her claim in three ways: collecting CS data from four sources: long-term participant observation, recording, interviews and a questionnaire; a survey of the data; and illustrating campus CS motivations with samples from the first-hand CS data. The author has confined the case study to some universities of Wuhan, a large city in mid China. CCNU has been selected to handle the collection of the first-hand code-switching corpus through a long-term participant observation, recording and interviews for CS motivations. In order to examine campus CS in more aspects and widen the research scope to some degree, a questionnaire has been designed and distributed to teachers and students in three universities of Wuhan. The questionnaire results have been calculated and analysed, with English majors and non-English majors considered respectively.Preliminary findings are presented in the data survey considering frequency of different categories of CS by different speakers, campus attitudes towards CS, and campus CS motivations. We are informed that campus CS can be classified into such different categories as spoken and written CS, English/Chinese (E/C) and Putonghua/dialect (P/D) CS, intra-sentential and inter-sentential CS according to different standards. Besides, the questionnaire statistics demonstrate that the great majority of respondents have e...