A Study on Chinese-English Code-switching from Register Perspective

Abstract

Chinese-English code-switching is getting more and more usual in both written and spoken forms as China carries out international exchanges and cross-culture communication. The analysis is done on the basis of previous research achievements and register theory in Halliday’s Systemic Functional linguistics (1978) employed as a theoretical framework with the purpose of analyzing the code-switching in People’s Daily. By means of study and analysis, it is found that the linguistic structure of the Chinese-English code-switching is mainly insertional code-switching, with phrasal insertion and lexical insertion taking up over the half; and that the register is realized by code-switching in newspaper and code-switching consists of register. Register variables restrict language choice in code-switching. Field governs code-switching on the purpose and subject-matter.