An Investigation Into Chinese/English Code-Switching In Blog

The current study is a tentative research on the structural features, and the motivations and functions of Chinese/English code-switching in Chinese Blog. The structural features are discussed drawing on Myers-Scotton’s Matrix Language Frame Model (MLF); the motivations and functions that code-switching performs are explored in the light of Verschueren’s Linguistic Adaptation Theory and Yu Guodong’s Adaptation Model. This study combines qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the data collected from three websites qq, sina and bokee.Three conclusions are reached based on the data analysis: (1) Chinese/English code-switching in Blog manifests great variability in terms of linguistic units and switching types: the frequencies of embedded English elements vary from the level of letter, affix, word, phrase, clause/sentence, sentence group to discourse, among which English words are found to be predominant, and most inserted words belong to content morphemes; as for the switching types, intra-sentential code-switching is dominant while inter-sentential code-switching possesses the lowest percentage. (2) Intra-sentential code-switching follows the grammatical constraints described in the MLF model: in ML+EL constituents, the morphosyntax follows the grammatical rules of the ML Chinese, and while EL islands follow the grammatical rules of the EL English, the morphosyntax beyond the EL islands is still constrained by the ML Chinese. (3) Code-switching is a strategy to achieve certain communicative purpose, which can be fully explained by Yu’s Adaptation Model: first, the adaptation to the linguistic reality to fill the lexical and semantic gap between Chinese and English; the adaptation to the social conventions to avoid embarrassment; and the adaptation to psychological motivations to perform pragmatic functions, such as creating humor and making quotation.The findings of this study hopefully will make contribution to broadening the research coverage of code-switching to some extent, and provide pragmatic evidence to confirm Myers-Scotton’s MLF model and Yu’s Adaptation Model. Meanwhile, this study may be suggestive to those who make language policy and language planning in China.