Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background
Codeswitching refers to the alternations of language varieties or languages within the same conversation. The advent of information age and the increasing exchanges among different countries make the phenomenon of codeswitching appearing much more than before. It not only changes the living habits, but also exerts a subtle influence on people’s thinking patterns and language choices. China is a multiethnic and multilingual country. Mandarin is the standard variety, adopting Beijing phonology as orthography, dialects in northern China as base and typical modern vernacular writings as grammatical norms. In this thesis, the dialect refers only to regional dialect, the regional variety different from standard variety used mainly orally. In China where various dialects coexist with multiple cultures, Mandarin is the standard language which has a significant impact on the nationwide communication. Under the background of protection of the dialect and promotion of Mandarin, people have already got rid of the constraint of a single language and generally everyone can master at least two languages or language varieties. If the speaker can master more than one language or language varieties, they tend to use them in an alternative way. Mandarin/dialect codeswitching is frequently used in daily life. As a special phenomenon in language contact, codeswitching has drawn great attention among overseas and domestic scholars, who have carried out their studies from the perspective of sociolinguistics, grammar, psychological linguistics, syntactic and conversational analysis and other related fields.
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1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study
As mentioned above, because of people’s strong interest, government’s high value, and frequent exchanges of different countries, China is experiencing a vigorous mass campaign for English learning. It can be seen that many films, TV series, magazines, variety shows adopt Chinese/English codeswitching as a strategy to conduct a smooth and effective interaction. There is no wonder that most of the scholars in China choose Chinese/English codeswitching as their research object. At the same time, due to the popularization of Mandarin, the dialect hardly appears in TV programs or other mass medias which makes it harder to select appropriate linguistic data containing Mandarin/dialect codeswitching at this aspect. Although some articles have discussed codeswitching in the
