A Study Of Social Pragmatic Function Of Code-switching From The Perspective Of Adaptation

Code-switching is a language contact phenomenon or a speech act of alternationbetween two or more languages or language varieties in the same utterance ordifferent utterances. It is a complex and universal phenomenon which exists inbilingual or multilingual communities. With the globalization of the modern world,more and more people have mastered two or more languages or language varieties.Therefore, the use of code-switching is becoming more and more frequent.Since1970s, many western researchers from different perspectives and fordifferent purposes have studied the code-switching from different disciplines, such associology, ethnography, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and so on. In the pastseveral decades, the researchers from different perspectives on code-switching havemade great achievements. Especially in linguistic domain, code-switching has beenstudied from four different approaches including sociolinguistic approach,grammatical approach, psycholinguistic approach and conversational analysisapproach.Jef Verschueren takes pragmatics as a functional perspective instead of treating itas one certain branch of linguistics. He puts forward adaptation theory which providesa new angle for the study of pragmatics. Chinese scholar Yu Guodong, based on theadaptation theory, advances adaptation model for the study of code-switching. Hepoints out that the adaptation model can be typed into the adaptation to linguisticreality, the adaptation to social conventions, and the adaptation to psychologicalmotivations.Under the theoretical framework of Yu‘s adaptation model, the authorconsciously collects examples from some daily conversations and some famousliterature works which can reflect the code-switching‘s social pragmatic function andthe realization of social pragmatic function in the communication process. Throughexploring and analyzing these examples collected by the author, this thesis gives abrief classification of code-switching‘s social pragmatic function based on the previous researches, analyzes how the code-switching realizes its social and pragmaticfunctions based on the adaptation model, and provides a new perspective for the studyof code-switching. Through analyzing these collected examples in details, the mainfindings in this thesis are:1) summarizing a more detailed classification ofcode-switching‘s social and pragmatic functions;2) proving that code-switchingadapts to linguistic reality, social conventions, and psychological motivations in orderto achieve communicative goals;3) advancing that code-switching realizes its socialand pragmatic functions in the adaptation process of code-switching.The findings of this thesis have some directive effects on the study ofcode-switching from pragmatics. This thesis, based on the Yu Guodong‘s adaptationmodel, puts forward that code-switching can realize its social and pragmatic functionsin the adaptation process of code-switching, which aims to provide a new perspectivefor the study of code-switching for the followers.