Chinese online stand-up comedy : code-switching patterns and strategies

Abstract

 Stand-up comedy has become very popular in China in recent years, and many online performances featuring stand-up comedy have emerged. It is noteworthy that in these Chinese online stand-up comedy (COStC) performances, comedians may switch between Chinese and English. This paper aims to examine the Chinese-English code-switching (CS) phenomenon in COStC by looking into the patterns and strategies of CS in performances of a COStC program, Rock & Roast, and exploring the reasons or motivations for comedians to switch to English. It categorizes the CS patterns into intra-sentential, inter-sentential, and tag-switching and sub-categorizes the intra-sentential CS according to the constituency hierarchy. This paper examines comedians’ motivations for CS from both microscopical and macroscopical perspectives. The Markedness model is applied to analyze the micro motivations of CS. The study found that most CS data used English as an unmarked language for three reasons: to fill the lexical gap, to adapt to situations, and to switch when both Chinese and English are unmarked. Moreover, CS cases with English as the marked language are mainly motivated for seven reasons: punning, expressing emotions, identity construction, association/indexation, contrast, symmetry & rhyme, and emphasis. This paper also examines the macro motivations of CS. It argues that the English ideology and the genre characteristics of COStC influence comedians’ English use. Overall, the paper contributes to understanding CS in COStC as a creative and strategic linguistic resource.