| Language, as the product of human civilization and development, directlyreflects human activity and social development. The constant connections amongcountries in politics, economy, culture, etc. lead to frequent language contact and thusbring with the change of sociolinguistic form such as pronunciation, syntax, etc.Code-switching, frequently occurs in people’s daily communication in bilingual andmultilingual communities, is a universal phenomenon of language contact. In recentyears, Chinese-English code-switching is constantly employed because of theeconomic development as well as the increasing contact with outside world. As aloyal audience of Taiwan entertainment talk show Kang and Xi Come, the authornoticed that Chinese-English code-switching occurs with a high frequency in thisprogram, which is played once a day in five weekdays. Long being the top on theranking list of audience rating of the program in the same category, Kang and XiCome serves as a highly representative corpus in related analysis.In the past three decades, scholars at home and abroad have made exploration oncode-switching from many perspectives such as sociolinguistics, grammar,psycholinguistics, conversational analysis, etc. The research from pragmatic approachin recent years is a brand-new one for code-switching analysis, which covers manyfactors like social, psychological, cultural and cognitive ones. The approachinterpreted code-switching phenomenon in a comprehensive manner and perfectlycombined the description and explanation of language phenomenon.Based on Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory, domestic scholar Yu Guodongproposed Linguistic Adaptation Model, pointing out the three features of naturallanguage: variability, negotiability and adaptability. Variability refers to theavailability of the languages for human’s choice, and negotiability means that humansmake language choice guided by highly flexible strategies while adaptability refers tohumans’ making negotiable selection from the available choices so as to realize theircommunicative goals. The present study attempts to adopt Yu Guodong’s adaptation model to analyze code-switching phenomenon in Kang and Xi Come, describe theimportance of this pragmatic strategy and ultimately explore the communicativefunctions realized in the process of adaptation.The present study made detailed analysis on types and forms of code-switchingbased on qualitative analysis, with the support of quantitative analysis. Data showsthat Chinese-English code-switching is the major switching form which is determinedby the dominant role of English code in the world linguistic ecology. The switchedcode includes many components such as words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, etc.while words take up the vast majority. The author made further exploration on theparts of speech about the words with the following finding: nouns, adjectives andadverbs account for a rather large percentage, which confirms the diversity ofcode-switching.In the present study, code-switching employed by hosts and guests is regarded asa language choice as well as a kind of pragmatic strategy to achieve theircommunicative purposes, and it is the adaptation to linguistic reality, socialconventions and psychological motivations, among which the adaptation to linguisticreality and social conventions belongs to passive adaptation while adaptation topsychological motivations is considered as active adaptation. From the analysis ofadaptability of code-switching, the author noticed that adapted code-switching canrealize many pragmatic functions such as lexical gap filling, mentioning foreignproducts or concepts, avoiding taboos, implicit expression, humor creating,explanation, emphasis, economy, fashion-seeking, etc.The present study proved the scientificity and effectiveness of Yu Guodong’sAdaptation Model and reflected the reality of language contact and the profoundeffects of English on Chinese. It is helpful for a better understanding and a scientificemployment of code-switching. |
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