Adaptability Of Chinese/English Code-switching In Microblog

With the emergence and development of internet technology in China, internet hasprovided people a broad platform for communicating and studying. Ever since Sinamicroblog came into being on the internet in2009, Microblog, a convenient and instantway of communication, has become popular. At the same time, the Internet languagewhich bears the feature of flexibility and unpredictability has attracted many scholars’attention and they have done a lot of research on this subject. However, there are stillsome deficiencies in the study of code-switching in microblog. As a result, in this thesis,the author lays particular emphasis on dealing with this phenomenon.The object of the research in this thesis is the Chinese\English code-switching inmicroblog. The author applies both quantitative and qualitative analyses to study thesephenomena and the data is collected from Sina microblog, Tencent microblog and Neteasemicroblog, from which35people’s14151pieces of microblog messages are chosen atrandom. Meanwhile, Myers-Scotton’s Matrix Language Frame Model (MLF) andVerschueren’s adaptation theory establish theoretical foundations for this research.During the research, the author pays attention to the analysis of the frequency ofinter-sentential and intra-sentential code-switching as well as the word class andgrammatical features of the embedded words from the perspective of structural andgrammatical patterns. Through these endeavors, we can conclude that intra-sententialcode-switching is the major types of switching in Chinese microblog. Besides, notionalword including noun, adjective and verb as well as their respective language island takesup a large percentage of the embedded language. And nearly all the words incode-switching have lost their grammatical patterns and abide by the grammaticalprinciple of the matrix Chinese language in microblog. At the same time, based onadaptation theory, the author makes a tentative research on the pragmatic functions ofcode-switching in microblog. Through the research, we can find that code-switching canbe used as realization of adaptation for linguistic reality, social conventions andcommunicators’ mental motivations so as to achieve the functions of making humor,seeking fashion and emphasizng something, etc. According to this research, the authorbelieves that we should treat the Internet language and code-switching rationally and lookon the influence of code-switching on our native language from a dialectic point view. The value of this research lies with the study of the structure, grammar and pragmaticanalysis of code-switching in microblog based on Matrix Language Frame Model andadaptation theory, we can further expand the field of e-discourse and confirm theapplicability of these theories above in the study of code-switching in e-discourse.As this research is a tentative study of code-switching in microblog, there are somelimitations such as incomplete data collection and insufficient theoretical summary andcomprehension which need to be further improved in the future.