A Study On Adaptation Of English-Chinese Code-Switching In English Films

In today’s world, the films, an important medium for transmitting the multifoldinformation, ranging from literary works to cultural propagation，has been conveyingcomprehensive content. In recent centuries, the frequent communication among differentcountries has made code-switching inevitable in English films and the phenomena of codeswitching incrementally receive the highlight. The linguists from different countries havedevoted themselves to studying code-switching and thus derived the diversified perspectiveson it such as social study, psychological study, linguistic study and so forth.This paper will apply Yu Guodong’s code-switching theory and Verschueren’sadaptation theory to mark and analyze English-Chinese code-switching tagging in Englishfilms from the perspectives of social constraints, linguistic reality and psychological motive,aiming to probe into the interrelationship between context and language adaptation. In thespecific film context, the character would consciously or unconsciously switch between twoor among multi languages due to the social constraints, linguistic reality and psychologicalmotives, such as the alternation of settings, the change of interlocutors, the second languageproficiency of the characters and the inner psychological motives like topic transfer, flauntand threat. Any aforesaid condition will urge the characters to initiatively or passively switchtheir languages. Adhering to the context adaptation, code-switching helps the characters usethe communication strategies and express accurately, meanwhile, enriching and extending thefilm plots. Code-switching in the English films manifests the communication approaches andtactics that the people adopt in social interaction. In this paper, the study on characteristicsand significance of language adaptation used in code-switching in English films proves thepractical application of Yu Giodong’s code-switching adaptive mechanism. Moreover, it alsoprovides a new international research platform for code-switching study, so as to emphasize,enhance and escalate the functions of code-switching in the cultural context.