An Analysis Of Code-switching In A Dialect Teaching TV Program-Pan Jiang Xue Tang

As a phenomenon of concurrent use of more than one language or languagevariety in a conversation, code-switching has attracted many scholars’ attention in thepast few decades. Compared with researches on bilingual code-switching, however,the studies of code-switching between two language varieties are relativelyinsufficient. Similarly, there are few studies to examine code-switching betweenPutonghua and a dialect in China. By collecting the data from a local dialect teachingTV program Pan Jiang Xue Tang (《攀讲学堂》), this thesis sets out to present atentative study on the code-switching phenomenon between Putonghua and Fuzhoudialect from the sequential organization of conversation analysis.Theoretical frameworks for many code-switching studies are based onMyers-Scotton’s Markedness Model, Poplack’s classification, Verschueren’sAdaptation Theory and Yu Guodong’s pragmatic adaptation model of code-switching.Meanwhile, few researches on code-switching have been done from the conversationanalysis approach. The application of conversation analysis (CA) has not beenexplored in-depth on code-switching. Peter Auer is one of the first researchers tostudy code-switching in bilingual conversation from conversation analysis approach.He points out CA approach focuses on the sequential implicativeness of languagechoice in conversation and the meaning of code-switching must be interpreted withreference to the language choices in the preceding and following turns. Therefore, thisthesis provides a qualitative study to analyze the interaction of two presentersturn-by-turn to show how they employ code-switching to organize their conversation.The theoretical framework of this paper is based on Auer’s distinction betweenparticipant-related and discourse-related code-switching. By analyzing the sequentialdevelopment of their interaction in several extracts, this paper explains how twopresenters use code-switching to accommodate each other’s language preferences and competences in the process of language negotiation and how they employcode-switching as a contextualization strategy. This analysis tries to provide readerswith a better understanding of motivations and functions of code-switching in such aspecific dialect learning program.The analysis of participant-related code-switching patterns reveals that eventhough two presenters have different preferred languages and uneven dialectproficiency, they are able to cater to each other’s language preferences andcompetences. About discourse-related code-switching, through the evidence-basedanalysis we can find two presenters make use of code-switching as a contextualizationcue to manage conversational tasks such as preference organization, repair andside-sequences.The sequential organization of conversation analysis proves to be an effectiveapproach to investigate code-switching in bidialectalism in this study, but somelimitations cannot be ignored. First, linguistic data are relatively limited, which willdowngrade the validity of study findings. Second, the transcription done by the authorherself is subjective and may be a little bit deviated from the most authentic forms.Last, the study of code-switching from conversation analysis approach isproblematical and imperfect to some scholars.