A Pragmatic Analysis Of Code-switching In Computer-mediated Communication

The study on computer-mediated communication(CMC for short)has been developing rapidly in recent years.However,the researches on code-switching in CMC are relatively few.Based on Yu Guodong’s Adaptation Model and combined with questionnaire survey,this thesis,from the pragmatic perspective,makes a research on Chinese/English code-switching occurring in everyday discourse of Chinese living in Northern America,intending to explore the adaptive issues of code-switching in CMC.Various ways of computer-mediated communication such as QQ,Wechat,forums and BBS,etc.,provide a rich collection of Chinese/English code-switching examples.First of all,the forums and BBS favored by Chinese people in Northern America are selected according to PageRank;secondly,five topics are chosen according to the numbers of daily publication of new posts in each section and the discourses concerning Chinese/English code-switching are drawn;finally,the representative data are selected and a corpus is built.In addition,discourses collected from QQ groups and WeChat groups with Chinese living in Northern America as its members is another source of the corpus.Altogether 72 texts with 4,447 characters,including 165 instances of code-switching,are analyzed.The process of data collection lasts for 6 months.In order to present the language phenomenon objectively,no amendments are made.The questionnaire,composed of 8 questions is designed to fully understand the language usage,network communication and code-switching of the Chinese people living in Northern America.Qualitative study intends to explain reasons of the code-switching performance and pragmatic functions it fulfills,and quantitative study is applied to analyze language distribution of code-switching and questionnaire problems.The results of this paper are as follows.1.Starting from the three characteristics of natural language,the corpus is analyzed,and five different language forms in code-switching are sorted.2.Three features of Chinese/English code-switching in CMC are stated as blending of Chinese words and English,blending of Chinese Pinyin and English and code-switching as the substitution for emotion exposure.3.Based on the Adaptation Model,detailed types and contents of adaptation are explored through the analysis of the corpus.As for the adaptation to linguistic reality part,linguistic existence and linguistic features are involved in the discussion,and linguistic reality concerns lacking of equivalent lexicons,the foreign occupations/positions,foreign food,different connotations,linguistic conventions and foreign products;for social conventions,topics concerning social taboos,verbal abuse,sex and sex-related topics are analyzed;psychological motivations are studied with the support of examples in terms of convenience seeking strategy,emphasizing strategy,modern favor gaining strategy,humor/fun creating strategy and emotion venting strategy.The study,to a certain extent,verifies and develops Yu Guodong’s Adaptation Model.It enriches the empirical research of code-switching from pragmatic perspective.Meanwhile,it is of practical significance for people to choose Chinese/English code-switching as a communicative strategy so as to have a better cross-cultural communication.