An Analysis Of Chinese-English Code-Switching On College BBS From The Adaptation Perspective

This thesis focuses on the code-switching phenomena between English andChinese on Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). The data is collected from the BBS ofeight universities in the Haidian District in the city of Beijing. Drawing on theprevious pragmatic studies on code-switching, the thesis made an analysis of thereasons behind the code-switching phenomena on BBS and provide furtherverification for the Language Adaptation Theory introduced by Verschueren.Language used on the Internet is different from any other form of language.Such an effective and flexible form of language goes very well with the informalcommunication on-line. BBS, as a new platform for on-line communication,reflects the characteristics of both internet language and code-switching. That iswhy the code-switching phenomena on BBS is picked as the object of thisresearch. The thesis focuses on both the categorization and verification of itsadaptability.The Language Adaptation theory introduced by Jef Verschueren provides anew perspective for the study on pragmatics. Yu Guodong and other Chineseresearchers applied this theory in their research and then came up with theAdaptive model of the code-switching studies. They pointed out thatcode-switching is a result of adaptation to the language reality, social conventionsand psychological motivation. Therefore this thesis put forward three questions asfollows. Why does code-switching occur in BBS discourse? In what form does itoccur? Can BBS code-switching be testified by the Adaptation Theory? And whatis the future trend or prospects of BBS code-switching?In order to answer these questions, through collection, classification and deepanalysis of the fist-hand data based on the Adaptation Theory, the thesis proposedthat different forms of code-switching on BBS, to a certain extent, adapt tolanguage reality, social conventions and psychological motivation respectively.Overlapping may be found in the discussion on its adaptation to socialconventions and psychological motivation. From the long-term point of view,code-switching, especially on BBS, would continue to exist with the ever increasing social interaction and communication between different languages.More effort is needed in future research.