An Analysis On Chinese-English Code-Switching Of Employees In Foreign Invested Enterprises

With globalization further unfolds and China’s foreign trade develops quickly, foreign invested enterprises blossom all around the country. The employees in foreign invested enterprises(hereinafter referred to as "FIEs") with high education background and work experience are daily steadily.They can speak at two languages. Most of employees in FIEs are bilinguals or multilinguals. The mixing expressions with English and Chinese are very active in daily files, office mailbox and business conversation. Based on this phenomenon, the dissertation tries to collect the code-switching by workers in FIEs in routine office work and analyzes the functions and motivation. The point is made that insight into the lesser explored area can significantly reveal a profound knowledge of the nature of code-switching and sharpen our understanding of current processes of language development in FIEs.There are many approaches analyze code-switching that are used and introduced, this thesis will take Shana Poplack’s typology of code-switching and pragmatic theory as the theory frame, and takes the language in FIEs as the study source data and the code-switching by workers as the study object, collects the real data from daily files, office mailbox and business conversation to do some tentative research. The dissertation mainly focuses on the following questions and offers some tentative answers:(1) What kind of structures and special features does the workers’ Chinese-English code-switching in FIEs have?(2) What functions and motives does this kind of code-switching have?This thesis selects a large number of code-switching examples, after analyzing of these examples, conclusions are presented as follows:(1) As a communicative strategy, Chinese-English code-switching could help a employee to survive in FIEs and to facilitate the interaction with others.(2) English learners should avoid incorrect code-switching and learn how to apply right code-switching model in appropriate language context;(3) The particular linguistic environment provides the real context and language data for studying code-switching. In this situation, code-switching as a very flexible and dynamic speech act plays its full function combine with the subjective and objective factors of employees.