A Study Of Code Switching In TV Talk Show-Mr. Zhou Live Show

Code switching, as one of the most common linguistic phenomenons, hasreceived much attention from a large number of scholars in linguistic field. And TVtalk show, as a newly-emerging type of TV program, has been gaining popularitysince1954. Some famous TV talk shows, both at home and abroad, have been studiedby linguists, and fruitful achievements have been made.Mr. Zhou Live Show is a TV talk show featuring solo performance on stage andnumerous humor and sarcasm. There is diverse and a great quantity of code switchingin the utterance of the host, which has drawn the author’s attention. After referring torelevant literature in quantity, it is observed that most of the research on this linguisticphenomenon in the past is merely about the switching between English and Chinese,which actually takes up only a part in code switching phenomenon. Apart fromswtiching between different languages, there are other types still not receiving enoughattention, including switching between different dialects, different speech styles anddifferent genres and so on. With regards to the study on Mr. Zhou Live Show, muchmore attention has been paid to its humorous and sarcastic language style rather thancode switching, which occurs in the host’s utterance from time to time. Therefore, thisstudy will select linguistic code switchings appearing in47episodes which werepresented in succession from the Spring Festival in2010to the May Day Holiday in2012as the corpora, and adopts qualitative analysis as the major research method andquantitative one as the supporting way to study the code switching phenomenon in Mr.Zhou Live Show from the perspective of linguistic adaptation, with the aim of fillingthe vacancy in code switching study on Mr. Zhou Live Show as well as the insufficientimportance attached to various code switchings.Six parts are included in this study. The first part is concerning the background,the significance, the organization as well as the research questions of this study; thesecond part is about the literature review, including defining code switching, talkshow as well as Hai Pai Qing Kou art and Mr. Zhou Live Show itself, reviewing andsummarizing previous relevant studies; the third part presents the theoreticalframework, with its focus on the linguistic adaptation theory and its application incode switching; the fourth part describes the research methods employed in this study,and the data collection process and data analysis method are included; the next part isthe main body of this study, and it makes the qualitative analysis and quantitative support on the collected corpora, using the Adaptation Theory, based on which someconclusions are reached; the last part summarizes the findings presented in the fifthpart, and based on the summary it puts forward the limitations of this study.Meanwhile it provides some suggestions and implications for the future study.It is found that, firstly, there are various types of code switching in Mr. Zhou LiveShow, including the switching between English and Chinese, between MandarinChinese and Shanghai dialect, between formal and informal speech styles andbetween different genres and so on; secondly, the host employs the code switchingstrategy out of the motivations of filling linguistic gap, adjusting to social norms aswell as meeting psychological needs; finally, code switching in Mr. Zhou Live Showserves as entertaining the audience, and more importantly, it helps to promote theprogram from local market to the national market and helps to lift the degree ofrecognition of Shanghai culture around a national scope.