Register Analysis Of Code-switching In Chinese Love Song Lyrics Discourse

Code-switching simply refers to two or more codes (or language varieties) appearing in one discourse. It has become a common phenomenon, and provides a new field and prospect for linguists to study language.The approaches to code-switching are mainly from three aspects:the first is the grammatical approach that studies the forms and the structural characteristics of code-switching. The second is the sociolinguistic approach which focuses on the research of the characteristics, the motivations and the functions of code-switching from social aspects. The third one is the functional linguistic approach, which brings up language principles on the basis of the language use, including ideational, interpersonal and textual factors. In this thesis, register theory in functional linguistics will be applied to the code-switching study in Chinese love songs to prove the applicability and the feasibility of the functional linguistics in code-switching.There are two purposes in this thesis:the first is to reveal the characteristics of code-switching in Chinese love song lyrics discourse; the second is to analyze the motivations of code-switching in order to explore the restrictive functions of register theory.In this thesis,200 Chinese love song lyrics which contain Chinese-English code-switching are downloaded with the audio versions at random, and listened to one by one to make sure all these lyrics match their audio versions. Then the research is conducted in the following three steps:the first is the introduction to the relevant theories of code-switching; the second step is to classify the embedded codes into word and phrase insertion, clause insertion, discourse insertion and mixed insertion according to the forms of embedding. Then the writer analyzed the characteristics of code-switching with register theory and revealed the restrictive functions of this theory in code-switching.After a cautious counting, the writer finds that all the features of code-switching in love songs are restricted by the three dimensions of register. In order to make the songs popular, to meet the needs of youngsters, field, tenor and mode are working together to realize the three functions of language and lead to these features. That is, word and phrase insertions are the most common, followed by clause insertions, mixed insertions and textual insertions. Vague words and colloquial words are also common among the embedded codes, etc. All in all, the three dimensions restrict the numbers, the positions and the expressions of the switched words in accordance with language use in situation.