A Study On English-Chinese Code-Switching Of English Major Postgraduates From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Code switching,as a common phenomenon in intercultural communication,is not only a language system,but also a communicative strategy.It has been always the focus of linguistic researches.Many linguists have done researches and got some constructive results.While studying the E-C code switching of English major postgraduates from the perspective of adaptation theory is a relatively new research topic which can further explain the motivations of social,cultural and psychological aspects behind the language communication.There are two research hypotheses to be addressed in this thesis: ?Any code switching is not randomly conducted,while it is closely related to the properties of languages themselves,besides,E-C code switching is influenced by several factors.?Code switching is motivated by several reasons and has its functions which can be explained by Yu's adaptation theory of code switching.On college campus,there were 60 English major postgraduates involved in the research,including 55 females and 5 males.Their ages were from 23 to 30.They all have learned English for about ten years and majored in English for at least three years.It was worth mentioning that all of them have passed the TEM-8 and got different scores at various levels,but only two of them attended the oral test of TEM-8.Besides,they all had no studying aboard experiences.So their educational backgrounds and studying experiences were similar to some extent.Besides,on the campus,the basic communicative form between college students is language communication.College students,with an active and creative mind have the ability to conduct code switching between different languages or different varieties of one language.All these factors provide code switching with a favorable condition.All the observation began in November,2016,and ended in January,2017.The author collected about 150 extracts of conversations related to E-C code switching and selected 50 typical ones as the research materials.What's more,there were 7 questions involved in the questionnaire,aiming to uncover the code switching forms,frequency,people's attitudes toward this phenomenon and the motivations behind this behavior.This thesis,based on Verschueren's theory of adaptation and Yu Guodong's adaptation model,applies the methods of observations,interviews and questionnaire to explain that the reasons for E-C code switching of English major postgraduates are the adaptation of the linguistic reality,social conventions and psychological motivations.Besides,this kind of act contains several other special purposes and communicative intentions.