A Study Of Chinese-English Code-switching In Chinese Movies From2010to2013

Code-switching (CS), a common language phenomenon in people’s communication, refers to the use of more than one language or language variety within one sentence or in the same conversation. Since1970s, linguists have carried but researches on CS from various perspectives, such as social-linguistics, psycholinguistics, grammatics, conversational analysis and pragmatics, and remarkable results have been achieved. With the globalization and China’s further reform and opening-up, foreign words and expressions swarm into our country. Many domestic scholars become aware of this language phenomenon and start to conduct relevant’researches, mainly focusing on literary works, advertisements, classroom teaching and songs.With people’s living standards improved, watching movies has become a major form of entertainment for average people. In recent years, besides our mother tongue, audience notice frequent use of foreign languages in Chinese movies, e.g. English in Let Bullets Fly, French in Chinese Zodiac, Thai in Lost in Thailand, etc. This stirs up the author’s interest.and provokes her thinking.The author collects14Chinese movies in previous four years, in which there are phenomena of code-switching. Of all foreign languages employed in CS, English enjoys the highest frequency. Based on this discovery, the author attempts to do a research on Chinese-English CS in Chinese movies from both grammatical and pragmatic perspectives. On the one hand, under Myers-Scotten’s Matrix Language Model,469cases in the collected films are divided to draw the external features of Chinese-English CS as well as how they are distributed in the Chinese films. The present study proposes4types of CS:letter CS, word CS, sentence CS, and discourse CS. The former two belong to Matrix Language+Embedded Language Constituents, while the latter two are Embedded Language Islands. Besides, the first type, letter CS just make several appearances in the present data, while the rest boasts a higher frequency of employment. On the other hand, to identify the internal features of Chinese-English CS in Chinese movies, that is, the reasons why characters adopt Code-switching, the author conducts an in-depth analysis based on Yu Guodong’s Linguistic Adaptation Model. It’s found out that Chinese-English CS is adopted to adapt to language reality, social convention and psychological motivations. To be specific, by applying Chinese-English CS, movie characters can realize language reality, i.e. the roles’consideration of precision and convenience of communication; they can manage to observe social conventions like avoiding the feeling of being alienated and particular taboos; they are also driven by psychological motivations, such as explanation, emphasis, embarrassment avoidence, humor creation and flaunting language proficiency. These code-switching as adaptation to the three circumstances are not completely independent but probably overlap with one and another. They contribute to the movies as a means of both character shaping and appealing to audience.In brief, this study probes both external and internal features of Chinese-English CS in Chinese movies. Hopefully, it can offer a better perspective for audience to appreciate the lines of Chinese movies and shed some light on script writing of movies as well as CS research in the future.