An Analysis Of The Adaptability Of Chinese/english Code-Switching In Microblog

As the product of human civilization and historical development, language directly reflects people’s activities, interactions and social conditions. Code-switching is one of the outcomes of the language contact and frequently appears in people’s daily communication. Chinese/English code-switching has come to be a common occurrence not only in people’s daily conversations, but also in some new mass media, such as Microblog.Since the 1970 s, many linguists have explored this phenomenon from different perspectives, including sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, syntax, conversational analysis and pragmatics, and among which the pragmatics is the most convincing and promising one, providing a comprehensive and satisfactory explanation of the problems of the systematical and functional aspects of code-switching.The primary point of the presented study is to investigate codeswitching from social communicational perspective, to describe the structural features of code-switching, and explain the potential motivations of the performance, and explore the pragmatic functions of Chinese/English code-switching in the discourses of Microblog. The research is based on the theoretical framework including Myers-Scotton’s Matrix Language Frame Model(MLF), Verschueren’s Linguistic Adaptation Theory and Yu Guodong’s Adaptation Model.The study combines both qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the data collected from Microblogs. The qualitative analysis lies in the analysis of grammatical constraints, social motivations and functions of code-switching in Microblog; whereas the quantitative analysis is added with the help of statistical analysis, which aims to generalize the linguistic and structural features and distinguish different types of code-switching in Microblog. In the presented study, the writer adopts “participant observation” method and also designs a questionnaire to collect the data.The analysis of the presented study reveals that Chinese/English codeswitching in Microblog manifests certain linguistic features, and follows certain grammatical constraints. The presented study also shows that the performance of Chinese/English code-switching in Microblog is motivated to make three adaptations, including the adaptation to the linguistic reality, the adaptation to the social conventions and the adaptation to the psychological motivation.The findings of the presented study hopefully will make contribution to broadening the research coverage of code-switching to some extent, and proves the applicability and sufficiency of Myers-Scotton’s MLF Model, Verschueren’s Linguistic Adaptation Theory and Yu’s Adaptation Model when explaining the code-switching phenomenon.