A Study Of Chinese-English Code-Switching On Social Network Site "Renren.com"

This paper intends to conduct an analysis of Chinese-English code-switchingbehavior present on “renren.com”, a social network site (SNS) that is very popularamong Chinese university students. It collects data from languages used by138users on the site for a period of three months and from which builds a corpus of710instances of code-switching. By analyzing the corpus from both structural andfunctional perspective, it hopes to find out the patterns, functions, and motivationsof Chinese-English code-switching in the context of computer-mediatedcommunication (CMC).The paper analyzes the collected data systematically in order to obtain thesyntactic categories and their respective percentage, and it discusses the functionsof the code-switching such as code-switching for euphemism and for humor. Inaddition, with the previous findings, the paper proposes linguistic,computer-related, and social motivations of the code-switching on the site ofrenren, for example, principle of economy, creativity, and consolidation ofrelationships.