A Survey On Chinese-English Code Variation

"Variety is the spice of life", as the old saying goes. Globalization makes life varied. As a result of globalization, different cultures have established progressively closer contacts. Those closer contacts of different cultures have generated significant variations over life. Because language is the codification of culture, those closer contacts of different cultures are often manifested in the contacts of different languages. And those remarkable variations are often realized in code variation. Code variation refers to the mixing grammatical units of different languages in an area where different languages have set up closer contacts. It includes code-mixing and code-switching. Being common in language contact, code variation has thus attracted attention of linguists around the world. They began to study code variation from a variety of dimensions such as the sociolinguistic perspective, the psychological perspective, the syntactical perspective, and the perspective of linguistic anthropology. Scholars abroad have contributed a lot towards the understanding of the features of code variation and proposed a series of CS constraints and models. China also has seen similar variations in language use in consequence of the frequent intercourse with western countries such as U.S. and Britain and other English-speaking countries in various aspects such as culture, economy, and technology. Increasing importance is being attached to Chinese-English code variation. However, researches on this issue are rarely found in China. That is the major reason for the author of this thesis to choose and discuss this subject. This research is intended to analyze the features and reasons of Chinese-English code variation.This thesis starts with a discussion of code from the viewpoint of culture. And then this thesis explores the relationship between code and its corresponding cultural community as well as the difference between code and individual language style. After the introduction of the historical studies on code variation, the author classifiescode variation resulted from the contact of two clearly different languages into two types: code-mixing and code-switching. And based on Scotton's Markedness Model, the author sets forth the meanings of code-mixing and code-switching. Furthermore, the author tries to differ code-mixing from code-switching from in terms of structure and speakers' language competence. According to the corpus gathered in everyday life, the author summarizes the features of code variation that occur in the entire circle of Chinese, especially to the code variation of Mainland China. And next, depending on the three-filter mechanism of Scotton's Markedness Model in which the economic principle, the social-cultural norms, the personal principle, and the cooperative principle play a guiding role, the author examines the rational mechanism for code variation. Due to its rich function, code variation is practically valuable, and is able to meet the needs of the society; therefore, code variation is possible in society.