A Study Of Chinese-English Code-switching In Modern Chinese Sitcoms

As a social-cultural phenomenon, code-switching is the result of languagecontacts between different languages. The earliest study on code-switching began toappear in the early twentieth century and then it is seen as one kind of language defect.It was not until1970s with gradual progress of sociolinguists that code-switchingbecomes a important research topic. During the following30years, code-switchingsuccessfully arouses scholars’ attention in many fields, especially in the area oflinguistics. Overseas and domestic scholars did quantities of wide and deep researcheson code-switching from the perspectives of syntactic, sociolinguistics,psycholinguistics, conversation analysis and pragmatics. Those researches wereconducted mainly on the basis of written materials, such as papers, magazines orbooks and those spoken materials were involved in a small percentage.Based on those predecessors’ research achievements, this paper tries to studyChinese-English code-switching(hereafter C-E CS) in Love Apartment with a hope toexplore the characteristic patterns of C-E CS in modern Chinese sitcoms; reasons thataffect these patterns and those language switchers’ motivations when employing theC-E CS. All the data collected for this study comes from the series of the modernsitcom Love Apartment (I, II and III).Based on the theoretical framework of Jef Verschueren’s linguistic AdaptationTheory and Yu Guodong’s Adaptation Model in the angle of Pragmatics, the studyemploys both quantitative and qualitative methods to comprehensively classify,calculate and explain the characteristic patterns of C-E CS in Chinese modern sitcomsand give clear illustrations to those code-switchers’ motivations under thesecode-switching.The research results show that: (1) Characteristic patterns of C-E CS in modern Chinese sitcoms:There are three main types of code-switching in Chinese modern sitcoms, themajority of which are Chinese-English code-switching and occur in the followingseven forms: suffixes, letters, words, abbreviations, phrases, sentences and URLs,among which is the form of word that occurs with the highest frequency. What’s more,according to study on positions of Chinese-English Code-switching in a sentence, themajority of C-E CS takes place in the middle of the sentence.The reasons that be explained as follows: firstly, English is the mainstreamlanguage in modern society and more and more people begin to study and use it intheir daily life and therefore, it becomes fashionable when using the C-E CS whencommunicating with others in daily conversations. Secondly, due to its simplenessand understandability, the English words become the first choice for those people whoconduct code-switching. Finally, in order to comply with the nature ofsitcoms(novelty and amusement), actors in the play begin to say their lines with somecommon Chinese languages being the base, then insert the English codes as itshighlights to surprise the audience and then create the atmosphere of entertainment.(2) Motivations of C-E CS in modern Chinese sitcomsThe study shows that the main reasons that language users employcode-switching is that they want adapt to linguistic reality, social conventions andpsychological motivation. To be specific, to fill lexical gap, to mention foreignproducts and concepts, to seek convenience, to avoid social taboos, to show politeness,to create humor, to seek fashion, to emphasize, to show off. Besides, code-switchersemploy the C-E CS with a view to boost ratings and implant advertisements which arethe particular motivations for sitcoms.The thesis provides new pragmatic empirical material for future code-switchingstudies; meanwhile it can bring some meaningful guidance to those who employ heC-E CS in their daily communications. The author hopes that she can conduct afurther research on this topic as she study or work in the future.