Communications in Humanities Research
- The Open Access Proceedings Series for Conferences
Vol. 29, 19 April 2024
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Foreign company employees (FCEs, meaning local Chinese employees who work for foreign companies) have become a considerable social group in China. One of their salient characteristics is the language they use in their speech community: mixed language of Chinese and English, which is a classic case of code-mixing. Although some scholars have already noticed this phenomenon, few focused research has been found yet. Thus, this present research aims to look into this code-mixing case from an apparent-time, sociolinguistic perspective, focusing on the pragmatic motivations of this code-mixing. Accuracy, efficiency, emphasis, emotion softening and strengthening are the main motivations found in this case study. The present research also calls for more attentions on this code-mixing case in this special social community in the future.
code-switching, code-mixing, pragmatic motivation, multinational company
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The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
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