Study Of Chinese-English Code-switching In Chinese Blog

Language is the product of human civilization and historical development. It directly reflects people's activities, interactions and social conditions. The frequent contact among different speech communities for the political, economic and cultural purposes unavoidably leads to the language contact. Code-switching is one of the outcomes of this language contact and frequently appears in people's daily communication. With the rapid growth of Chinese economy and the increasingly frequent contact with the western culture, Chinese-English code-switching has come to be a common occurrence not only in people's daily conversations, but also in some new mass media, such as blog.Since 1970s, many linguists have explored this phenomenon from different linguistic approaches, including sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, grammatical, conversational analysis and pragmatic approach. Among all the approaches towards the CS study, the pragmatic approach is the most convincing and promising. It can explain the process of CS in a dynamic context, which integrates the linguistic, social, psychological, cognitive, and cultural factors involved in the process of CS for study, and thus may explain the problems of the systematical and functional aspects of CS comprehensively and satisfactorily.The current study is a tentative study on the structural features, and the motivations and functions of Chinese/English code-switching in Chinese blog. The structural features are discussed drawing on Myers-Scotton's Matrix Language Frame Model (MLF); the motivations and functions that code-switching performs are explored in the light of Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory and Yu Guodong's Adaptation Model. This study combines qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the data from QQ blog.Three conclusions are reached based on the data analysis:1) Chinese/English code-switching in blog manifests great variability in terms of linguistic units and switching types:the frequencies of embedded English elements vary from the level of letter, affix, word, phrase, clause/sentence to discourse, among which English words are found to be predominant, and most inserted words belong to content morphemes; as for the switching types, intra-sentential code-switching is dominant while inter-sentential code-switching possesses the lowest percentage. 2) Intra-sentential code-switching follows the grammatical constraints described in the MLF Model:in ML+EL constituents, the morphosyntax follows the grammatical rules of the ML Chinese, and while EL islands follow the grammatical rules of the EL English, the morphosyntax beyond the EL islands is still constrained by the ML Chinese.3) Code-switching is a strategy to achieve certain communicative purpose: first, the adaptation to the linguistic reality to fill the lexical and semantic gap between Chinese and English; the adaptation to the social conventions to avoid embarrassment; and the adaptation to psychological motivations to perform pragmatic functions, such as creating humor and making quotation.The finding of this study hopefully will make contribution to broadening the research coverage of code-switching to some extent, and provide pragmatic evidence to confirm Myers-Scotton's MLF Model and Yu's Adaptation Model.