Language Use and Code-Switching in Computer-Mediated Communication, focusing on MSN Messenger in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Shih, Kai-Yi Stacy, 施凱翊
• Other Authors: Huang, Li-Jung Daphne
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/10432381396737253253

碩士 === 靜宜大學 === 英國語文學系 === 99 === This study describes the phenomenon of languages used in synchronous Computer-Mediated Communication, focusing on MSN Messenger, and the issue of language contact – code-switching (CS)–among Chinese- English bilinguals in Taiwan. Previous studies placed a great emphasis on conversational data of CS (Gumperz 1983; Myers-Scotton 1993; Muysken 1997). Little attention has been paid to how bilinguals or multilinguals use their linguistic resources in the CMC setting (e.g. Huang 2004). The aim of this research is to reveal how CS is identified among writing systems, depending on inspecting the language patterns and language use in online communication. The data reveals that, contrary to previous studies, there are two levels of CS, that is, CS analyzed at the level of language and at the level of writing system. Three languages and three writing systems used on MSN Messenger are identified in my data. The languages include Mandarin, Taiwanese, and English; meanwhile, the writing systems include Standard Written Chinese (SWC), Chinese Zhuyin and English alphabet. At the level of language, four patterns of CS are found: CS between Mandarin and English, CS between Mandarin and Taiwanese, CS between Mandarin and Taiwanese-Mandarin and CS among Mandarin, English and Taiwanese. Considering CS at the level of writing systems, three patterns are identified: CS between SWC and English Alphabet, CS between SWC and Chinese Zhuyin and CS among SWC, English alphabet and Chinese Zhuyin. Based on common thinking, both SWC and Chinese Zhuyin are used to represent not only Mandarin, but Taiwanese, and Taiwanese-Mandarin (Yang 2008); while English alphabets are merely used to represent English. Contrary to previous studied in the field of CS, the data shows that MSN Messenger users can use SWC and Zhuyin to represent English with similar to the usage of English alphabets to represent either Mandarin or Taiwanese. The data finds that there are more tokens of CS at the level of writing system (58.02%) than those of CS at the level of language (41.98%). The higher percentage of CS at the level of writing system may be attributed to the fact that the usage of writing system is so various and diversified, resulting from the widespread employment of English alphabet. The high frequency of using English alphabet is due to the great variety of linguistic features of English, such as capital letter, versatile English letter, onomatopoetic word, emotional icon (emoticon) and abbreviation. It is concluded that CS is a common language phenomenon on synchronous CMC whether at the level of language or at the level of writing system.