Book Description

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: It has now been about a decade and a half since the Internet and the World Wide Web have come to represent a major realm of research in various fields of linguistics. This is of course largely due to the fact that they offer easy access to a massive and unlimited amount of language data, which do not have to be transcribed in arduous ways as is the case with speech recordings. However, alongside this major cause of attraction, and despite the overall dominance of English, it is also the multilingual nature of the Internet which has naturally sparked the interest of bilingualism research as well as language contact research. It is the choice of and the switching between the available codes of the users' repertoires which mark a major topic of interest, and which shall be explored in the thesis at hand. The final focus of investigation will be the communicative functions and meanings of the phenomenon called code-switching (CS) as it naturally occurs in a Canadian-Croatian discussion forum. In order to prepare the theoretical ground for the analysis of my own corpus of computer-mediated communication (CMC) data, the first part of this research thesis will define the subject-matter and the origins of research into it, and a general overview of the classic linguistic treatment of the phenomenon will be given. Following, this paper will illustrate the major concepts and approaches relevant to the final purpose of the thesis, and point out potential critique of their assumptions. In order to establish a link between code-switching phenomena in general and their communicative setting in the conducted study, the subsequent chapter will address several issues in computer-mediated communication research. Thereafter a review of renowned studies of code-switching phenomena in computer-mediated communication will be provided. Finally, the Croworld corpus, including its compilation and structure, and the backgrounds of the users involved, will be presented. My subsequent analysis of selected forum posts will aim to relate the tenets of the classic approaches, as well as the insights of the CMC studies regarding the significance of code-switching practices Inhaltsverzeichnis:Table of Contents: 1.INTRODUCTION1 2.CODE-SWITCHING AS A FIELD OF RESEARCH2 2.1The Object of Research2 2.2The Origins of Code-switching Research5 2.3The Research History6 3.MAJOR EXPLANATORY FRAMEWORKS9 3.1Gumperz: Situation - Metaphor - We and [...]