An Exploratory Analysis On Code-switching Occurrences On Danmaku Website

The cyber space has changed people's way in communicating with each other from interacting face to face into screen to screen.The online communication has been gaining wide public attention in recent years due to its profound impact on social behavior.The vibrant Internet video users are chosen to be the research group,to be more specifically,the ACG(Animation,Comic and Game)community on a Danmaku website called Bilibili.By focusing on their new way of communication in connecting with social factors,linguistic features and motivations of Chinese-English code-switching occurrences are explained.We first selected the movies with the highest number of Danmaku,namely an instant comment,from 12 different categories according to the classification of the Bilibili.com and filtered code-switching material in each category.Based on the chosen material,we formed a corpus with 5843 code-switching occurrences out of 121,372 Danmaku through computational linguistic technology.Using both quantitative and qualitative methods,we tried to find out the linguistic features from the code-switching occurrences in the Danmuku corpus.We also distributed 629 questionnaires online covering subjects from every province from mainland China intending to find out online users' motivations and attitudes towards the use of code-switching based on Markednes Model.The results show that there are mainly four different linguistic constituents reflected in the code-switching occurrence: letters,lexemes,phrases and sentences.The proportions of each category are 9.2%,80.1%,6.5% and 4.2% respectively.The unmarked and marked code-switching occurrences demonstrate how ACG community remains or change the existing rights-and-obligation set in specific occasions,which offer insights to the motivations behind it.The questionnaire did not only find out four positive motivations including “For humor”,“For different context and occasion”,“For the convenience and clarity” and “For fashion and curiosity” and four negative motivations covering “For social status and identity”,“For showing of English proficiency”,“Euphemism” and “Lack of corresponding expression”,but also reveal people's promising attitude towards Chinese-English code-switching on Danmaku website.The study enriches the theories in Chinese code-switching among the subculture community.Moreover,it also enriches the research gap of the analysis of Danmaku from the perspective of linguistics.