A Pragmatic Study On Chinese-English Code-switching In The Talk Show Day Day Up

With the trend of globalization, the exchange and communication amongdifferent countries and areas are increasing. People from different parts of the worldare of various cultural backgrounds, following different social norms and usingdifferent languages or codes. Code-switching, as one of the most frequent linguisticphenomena, arouses much attention and interest of linguistic scholars and researcherswho study this linguistic phenomenon from various perspectives such as conversationanalysis, syntax, socio-linguistics, psychology and pragmatics. On the basis of thesetheories, Chinese linguists collect corpus from different sources: daily conversation,films, classes, literature works, songs and net chatting, etc., which infuses new energyinto the study of Chinese-English code-switching. They select the corpus based ontheir studying goals, interest and ways. Yet taking Chinese-English code-switchinginstances from TV entertainment program as the corpus is still a new try.The thesis collects the Chinese-English code-switching instances from theentertainment talk show Day Day Up in Hunan TV channel as the target examples.Totally73videos are collected and transcribed, ranging from27th May,2011to1stJune,2012. Qualitative methodology is applied here. Memetic theories, politenessand face theories, and linguistic adaptation theory are employed as the theoreticalframe to analyze the generation of Chinese-English code-switching, the effect ofpoliteness and face in maintaining communicative interest, and the ways interactantsadapt themselves to the entertainment context.The thesis focuses on two questions:(1) How are Chinese-English code-switchersin Day Day Up affected by memetic factors to form the communicative ability ofcombining different languages or codes, namely the ability of producingChinese-English code-switching in their communication?(2) How do interlocutorsmake use of code-switching to maintain communicative interest in an entertainmentcontext under the influence of politeness and face? It is found that under the specialdynamic entertainment context, code-switching is the language choice of language users with various degree of salience in a highly flexible way. Meanwhile, it ispointed out that the speaker can achieve various communicative goals through suchdynamic adaptations with the help of code-switching, which has its correspondingpragmatic functions in entertainment context.The analytical conclusions are of much help in stimulating the audience to paymore attention to the increasing occurrence of Chinese-English CS in entertainmentprograms and to have better understanding of the reasons and functions of suchcode-switching. Since code-switching requires that the speaker be provided withcertain bi-lingual ability, the present analysis has certain reference significance andimplications to people’s multi-linguistic ability. It is also instructive for people tocarry out successful and efficient communication by means of code-switching.