A Study On Chinese/English Codeswitching In Chinese Popular Songs

Codeswitching is a common phenomenon in daily communication in bilingual or multilingual communities. It is the result of language contact. With the increase of international communication, it also frequently happens in monolingual communities such as China. Therefore, more and more researchers have been doing research on it. Popular songs play an important role in people's leisure time and we can see that codeswitching frequently appearing in the songs. In addition, the song lyrics discourse is a genre that is between spoken and written discourse so the codeswitching in songs has its own features. And this thesis chooses Chinese/English codeswitching in Chinese popular songs as the data, using metafunction and register theory as the theoretical framework, aiming to find out all these features. And this dissertation also intends to find how codeswitchings in songs realize three metafunctions in this genre and the motivation of its appearance. And the author chooses Huang Guowen's codeswitchings classification as the model, classifying codeswitching into alternational, insertional and bilingual ones. And the insertional switching can be further divided into text insertion, clause insertion and words and phrases insertion. After the analysis the author finds that in song lyrics the insertional switching happens most frequently and the bilingual switching never happens. And most of the insertional switching is words and phrases insertion, the majority of which are nouns. The inserted clauses are short and easy and the text insertion often happens in rap. These switchings realize ideational function through citing and filling linguistic gaps, realizing interpersonal function through shortening the distance between singers and hearers, expressing the meaning implicitly and emphasizing the core of the songs, realizing textual function through increasing the wholeness and cohesiveness of the text. Through the analysis from register theory the author finds that it is the three dimensions of register, namely, field, tenor and mode, that determine the motivation of using codeswitching and their features.