An Analysis Of English-Chinese Code Switching In Computer Mediated Communication From Adaptation Theory Perspective

Owing to the tremendous development of science and technology, the Internet comes into our life and has been playing an important and significant role in communication today. Human beings rely on Computer-Mediated Communication (shortened as CMC hereinafter) to exchange messages of many kinds through various channels, such as chat-room, BBS, Blog or E-mail. In China, during these synchronized and asynchronized communications, people are not only just using Chinese, but also English, and this phenomenon is called code switching (shortened as CS hereinafter) in linguistic field.To be specific, CS refers to two different languages alternatively used by bilinguals in the same or different speech turns, which is an unavoidable result of language contact and interaction under current conditions. Therefore, in China, with the frequent global communication and the increasing number of English/Chinese bilinguals, the Chinese/English CS is seemingly popular and omnipresent, and has become a preference drew the attention from the researchers in many fields. Up to now, the research results are fruitful, useful and problematic.Back in 1970s, plenty of scholars abroad have initiated many studies in CS from varied angles and perspectives and they put forward many testified CS models which are valuable for the following researchers. While, there are still some problems on these studies, because the scholars are paying their attention to one aspect. Their research is unilateral. Chinese scholar Yu Guodong's Adaptation Model which is conducted from pragmatic approach is more covering and revealing because it comprises of all the social, cultural, psychological aspects which is quite different from the others. In this model, Yu classifies CS into three adaptations, namely, linguistic reality, social conventions and psychological motivations. And he subgrouped the psychological motivations into fifteen categories, such as humor-creating, identity-building and he subdivided the linguistic reality into adaptation to linguistic existence of English and Chinese and the adaptation to linguistic features of English and Chinese. He did not classify the social conventions.Basing on Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory and Yu Guodong's Adaptation Model on CS, this paper mainly aims to carry out a detailed analysis of Chinese/English CS in CMC from an adaptive perspective and it is a preliminary pragmatic analysis with a focus on presenting the pragmatic adaptability that the netizens' (An Internet user who is trying to contribute to the Internet's use and growth) Chinese/English CS can fulfill. It tries to testify the suitability of Yu's Adaptation Model and finds out some unique features of CS in CMC context. The relevant materials are collected from the author's personal QQ chat-room, Blog, E-mail and BBS. And all the involved netizens are college students who have four years Standard English Education. And they are the author's friends.After a thorough analysis, the author finds out that Verschueren's Adaptation Theory and Yu Guodong's Adaptation Model can be successfully applied to the analysis of Chinese/English CS in CMC, and there are some differences. In this paper, according to all the collected data, linguistic reality is classified into four groups, namely fills lexical gaps, avoids ambiguity, accurate in quotation and abides the principle of economy; social conventions are subgrouped as to avoid bad words and avoid taboos. Avoiding bad words are universal, while avoiding taboos in this paper is China specific. For example, Chinese people or communicators in CMC do not use the word同性恋, they prefer to use the English counterpart, the words such as gay or lesbian or homosexual. Under the CMC context, the psychological motivations are six types. The addressee selection, dismal-avoidance, identity-protecting, example-giving, satire-constructing strategy, just name a few do not appear here.The author also finds out that sometimes there is no clear boundary between these three. On some occasion, CS adapts to these two or three which is also a limitation of this paper.