Code-mixing of English in Mandarin Magazines – A case study in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Lai, Yishan, 賴奕杉
• Other Authors: Huang, Lijung
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/70027320871761503643

碩士 === 靜宜大學 === 英國語文學系 === 99 === This project aims to explore the language use of English code-mixing in Mandarin magazines in Taiwan. A total of 2928 tokens of code-mixing from three fashion magazines – Marie Claire, Bella, and GQ – were collected and examined. Previous studies principally researched code-mixing and code-switching in conversation (e.g. Poplack & Sankoff 1980; Gumperz 1982), with some focusing on written media such as advertisements and newspapers (e.g. Shih & Soong 1998; Hsu 2000). Little attention has been paid to more diverse written media such as magazines. This study thus examined code-mixing in magazines. There are three main issues discussed in the thesis. First, various characteristic properties of English are found to be used in Mandarin texts in the magazines. Second, a linguistic analysis of code-mixing was conducted. And third, socio-pragmatic functions were identified and analyzed from the code-mixing expressions. There are totally seven distinctive features of English found to be at use in my corpus, including English letters with creative meanings, capital letters, lower cases, abbreviations, bound morphemes, compound, and English letters used as classifications (Danet’s 2001; Lin’s 2008). From these properties, the writers of the selected magazines are found to employ English in distinctive ways to convey creativeness and fun for attracting readers’ attention. The linguistic analysis identified two levels of code-mixing – intra-sentential and inter-sentential. Almost all instances of code-mixing are intra-sentential (98.9%). Intra-sentential code-mixing includes three levels – lexical level, phrasal level, and clausal level. Some idioms are also found in the intra-sentential code-mixing. There are eight categorizations identified at the lexical level, including nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, propositions, conjunctions, interjections, and miscellaneous words. Phrasal level contains six kinds – noun phrase, adjectival phrase, adverbial phrase, verbal phrase, prepositional phrase, and miscellaneous phrase. Clausal level only includes noun clause. Furthermore, the socio-pragmatic functions of code-mixing in the magazines are analyzed and discussed in terms of Appel and Muysken’s (1987) and Gumperz (1982) frameworks, along with several modifications according to Shih and Soong (1998), Li (2000), and Chen (2006). It is discovered that the characteristics of the code-mixing expressions express several socio-pragmatic functions, for example, principle of economy, attention-getting, poetic function, expressive function, and referential function, etc. There are totally 11 functions identified in the data, including referential function, specificity, principle of economy, convention words, expressive function, directive function, attention-getting, poetic function, reiteration, creation, and authenticity. That is, abundant code-mixing expressions express multiple functions.