A Rhetorical Study Of Code-switching In Micro-blogs

As China's comprehensive national strength and its international competitiveness enhance, and international status rises, cross-cultural communications have also become more and more frequent. Code-switching(CS), as a kind of universal language contact phenomenon, not only frequently appears in people's daily communication, but also has been widely used in some new and stylish online mass media, such as micro-blogs. In recent years, CS has attracted wide attention and has become a hot spot in sociolinguistic research field. Many scholars have done research on it from different perspectives.However, few scholars regard it as a kind of rhetorical behavior and make a rhetorical study on it. Therefore, it is more significant and innovative to study CS in the unique register of micro-blogs from the perspective of rhetoric.This paper selects the sample data from Sina micro-blog, which is one of the representative and prevalent network communication platforms. This research takes Chinese-English CS as examples, treats Chinese as the matrix language and English as the embedded language. Based on the topic of “A Rhetorical Study of Code-switching in Micro-blogs”, the research mainly focuses on the distribution patterns, rhetorical functions and motivations of CS in blogs. In terms of the methods, this research combines quantitative and qualitative methods together.The research results indicate the following findings. First, in terms of syntactic structure, intra-sentential CS is the main distribution pattern in micro-blogs; in terms of linguistic units, the CS in blogs involves various units, such as letters, morpheme, word,phrase, etc., in which words account for the largest proportion and are the main distribution patterns; in terms of part of speech, nouns are the most common ones when bloggers choose words to make CS. Secondly, as a kind of rhetorical behavior, CS has such main rhetorical functions as follows: euphemism, convenience, emphasis and explanation. Thirdly, the reason why bloggers employ CS in blogs is to achieve rhetorical effects, which tries to make blogs concise and humorous, and to meet the needs of communication psychology and context.This paper utilizes the latest corpus to do research on the CS in micro-blogs from the perspective of rhetoric. All of these could expand the research field of code-switching,enrich and deepen the public's understanding of CS. In addition, this research facilitates the public to treat the language phenomenon correctly and employ it more flexibly and properly so as to promote the diversified development of the network language.