Tài liệu Vietnamese english code switching in blogs by young beauty bloggers in vietnam

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES NGUYỄN THỊ KIM CHI VIETNAMESE-ENGLISH CODE-SWITCHING IN BLOGS BY YOUNG BEAUTY BLOGGERS IN VIETNAM Hiện Tượng Trộn Mã Việt-Anh Trong Các Bài Viết Blogs Về Làm Đẹp Của Một Số Blogger Trẻ Tại Việt Nam MA THESIS Major Thesis Major: English Linguistics Major code: 8220201.01 HÀ NỘI – 2019 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES NGUYỄN THỊ KIM CHI VIETNAMESE-ENGLISH CODE-SWITCHING IN BLOGS BY YOUNG BEAUTY BLOGGERS IN VIETNAM Hiện Tượng Trộn Mã Việt-Anh Trong Các Bài Viết Blogs Về Làm Đẹp Của Một Số Blogger Trẻ Tại Việt Nam MA THESIS Major Thesis Major: English Linguistics Major code: 8220201.01 Supervisor: TS. Nguyễn Thị Thu Thuỷ HÀ NỘI – 2019 Declaration I, hereby declare that this written thesis is all my own work except where I indicate otherwise by proper use of quotes and references and has never been submitted to any other institution. This thesis has been submitted for examination with approval from the candidate‟s supervisor. Signature ________________________ Nguyễn Thị Kim Chi i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge my most sincere gratitude towards my supervisor, Dr. Nguyen Thi Thu Thuy, without whose kind support and invaluable guidance, this thesis will be in complete failure. Her unfaltering encouragement and genuine motivation have planted great inspiration in me in fulfilling this research. I am also forever indebted my most profound appreciation and gratitude to my family, who has not for one moment resigned faith on me. I was so blessed with constant moral support to eventually reach the end of the thesis. Finally, I would like to express my deepest thanks to the Faculty of Graduate Studies, without whose support and assistance, I would not have been able to complete my whole journey of MA study as well as this MA thesis. ii ABSTRACT This research attempts to investigate the language behavior of Vietnamese-English code-switching behavior presented in blogs, a typical mode of computer-mediated communication belonging to young beauty bloggers in Vietnam. Although there have been exhaustive numbers of definition regarding the issue in question, the definition of code-switching in the study was adopted from Myers-Scotton‟s stating that code-switching is a term to refer to the alternations of linguistic varieties within the same conversation. In this research it is displayed through the genre of written text. The first goal of this study is to describe the presentation in which the linguistic patterns of Vietnamese-English code-switching are exhibited in journal entries written by five blog owners. The second purpose aims at evaluating the social functions that are positioned in such switches. As a result of this study, it is discovered that Vietnamese-English code-switched language in blogs is in fact an extension of language in spoken interaction, and there are some distinctive features in the distribution of major parts of speech regarding noun, verb and adjective insertion in the language contact. Switches for idiomatic expressions are also evident. In addition, examples on the social functions of clarification, quotation, interjection, and repetition under unmarked choices of code-switching are identified and explained with in-depth illustrations. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ..................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ...................................................................................................... iv List of Abbreviations ................................................................................................ vi List of Figures and Tables ....................................................................................... vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION .............................................................................. 1 1.1. Rationale of the thesis ..................................................................................... 1 1.2. Aims and objectives ........................................................................................ 3 1.3. Scope of the thesis ........................................................................................... 4 1.4. Method of the thesis ........................................................................................ 5 1.5. Design and structure ........................................................................................ 6 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW ................................................................... 8 2.1. Definitions of Key Terms ................................................................................ 8 2.1.1. Code as Language Variety ........................................................................ 8 2.1.2. Code-switching ......................................................................................... 9 2.1.3. Code-switching and Code-mixing .......................................................... 10 2.1.4. Code-switching and Borrowing .............................................................. 12 2.2. Literature on Code-Switching ....................................................................... 14 2.2.1. Literature on Structural Approach .......................................................... 15 2.2.2. Literature on Functional Approach ......................................................... 17 2.2.3. The Thesis‟s Theoretical Framework ..................................................... 24 2.3. Review on Related Studies ............................................................................ 25 2.3.1. Studies on Code-switching in Social Network Context ......................... 25 2.3.2. Studies on Blogs and Blogging ............................................................... 26 2.4. Summary ....................................................................................................... 29 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY ........................................................................... 30 3.1. Methods of the study ..................................................................................... 30 3.2. Subjects of the study ..................................................................................... 32 3.3. Data Collection .............................................................................................. 35 3.4. Data Analysis Procedure ............................................................................... 37 3.5. Summary ....................................................................................................... 39 Chapter 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION........................................................... 40 iv 4.1. Findings ......................................................................................................... 40 4.2. Linguistic Presentation .................................................................................. 43 4.2.1. The EL noun in ML + EL constituents ................................................... 45 4.2.2. The EL verb in ML + EL constituents .................................................... 48 4.2.3. The EL adjective in ML + EL constituents ............................................ 50 4.2.4. The entire EL islands .............................................................................. 53 4.3. Functional Presentation ................................................................................. 56 4.3.1. Code-switching as unmarked choice ...................................................... 56 4.3.2. Code-switching for clarification ............................................................. 58 4.3.3. Code-switching for quotation ................................................................. 59 4.3.4. Code-switching for interjection .............................................................. 60 4.3.5. Code-switching for repetition ................................................................. 60 Chapter 5: CONCLUSION ...................................................................................... 62 5.1. Summary of Findings .................................................................................... 62 5.2. Significance of the Research ......................................................................... 63 5.3. Limitations and Suggestions for Further Research ....................................... 64 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................ 66 APPENDICES ............................................................................................................ I APPENDIX A: Transcription Conventions ................................................................ I APPENDIX B: Transcription Sample ....................................................................... II APPENDIX C: Text Identification Sample ............................................................. III v List of Abbreviations CS: Code-switching MLF model: Matrix Language Frame model ML: Matrix language EL: Embedded language RO: Rights-and-Obligations EFL: English as a Foreign Language Ex.: example vi List of Figures and Tables List of figures Figure 1: The Continuum for Levels of Borrowing in Code-switching Utterances (Poplack et al., 1987) ............................................................................................... 13 Figure 2: Four different quadrants of blogs ............................................................ 28 Figure 3 Sample segmentation and en-pos run results ........................................... 41 Figure 4: Summary in the total use of code-switching ........................................... 42 Figure 5: Comparison in the use of total CS among five subjects .......................... 43 Figure 6: Distribution of EL nouns in ML + EL constituents ................................ 45 Figure 7: Distribution of EL verbs in ML + EL constituents ................................. 48 Figure 8: Distribution of EL adjectives in ML + EL constituents .......................... 51 List of tables Table 1 Distinction between code-switching and code-mixing .............................. 12 Table 2: Poplack‟s (1980) Identification of Code-switching Based on the Type of Integration into the Base Language ......................................................................... 12 Table 3: Description on Subjects‟ Details .............................................................. 33 Table 4: Coded Scheme for Collected Data ............ Error! Bookmark not defined. vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1. Rationale of the thesis The study of code-switching has been ubiquitous for over several decades and has still received a significant amount of attention from researchers universally now. Among major scholars working both intensively and extensively on the topic, Gumperz (1977; 1982), Poplack (1978; 1980; 1987), Myers-Scotton (1992; 1993; 1995; 2002) and Muysken (2000) Milroy & Muysken (2012) are most acknowledged and prolific authors to provide insights to the subject matter of codeswitching from both structural and sociolinguistic approach. Even though each author has their different theories in defining and clarifying code-switching from their ground approach, one universal truth is made clear: code-switching is a popular linguistic behavior occurring at either utterance level or at discourse level, towards which code-switching is familiarized with the term intra-sentential (when the switch is made within sentences) and inter-sentential level (when the switch is across sentences). On the one hand, there is the majority of studies on code-switching situations from sociolinguistics (or ethnographic) descriptions. On the other hand is the volume of research conducted on grammatical analyses of code-switching to underlie universal rules, models and explanations of the patterns in the switch. A more recent branch emerging in studying code-switching is the pragmatic and conversation analytic approach in which most of the researchers attempt to identify the meanings of this language alternation in conversations (Gardner-Chloros, p.10). Scholars from the first approach, typically Gumperz (1977), believes that the outcome of language contact situations is determined by social and economic variables, either due to the relative prestige of one variety as opposed to another or its association with a more powerful group (Gardner-Chloros & Gardner-Chloros, 2010, p.42). Advocates of the second approach also encounter various challenges in explaining the phenomenon from a universally acute explanation. Problems with grammar are placed centrally in the universalness of grammar itself. The third 1 approach sees the rise in the accountability for the social circumstances that affect the form of the language alternation. Affluent work by Muysken (2002) as well as other projects under this branch have looked at code-switching from further sociolinguistic determinants, specifically from 1-conversational/pragmatic motivations; 2- social psychological influences; and 3- gender preferences (2010, p.65). Each approach would step further in providing more practical evidence proving that their theoretical frameworks work, and with that different streams of research would emerge. However different each author may follow in their approaches, one similarity remains unchanged, that is to highlight the importance of studying code-switching as a linguistic behavior and a social phenomenon. In addressing the significance of this increasingly controversial issue (Gardner-Chloros & Gardner-Chloros, 2010), each researcher apparently has their major claims and proposals. While the prominent author of the 1970s - Gumperz (1977) asserts that understanding codeswitching helps providing insights to understand the functioning of human signs in communication, the social symbols in verbal interaction and the role of speech variation in human groups (Gumperz, 1977, p.31), pioneer in grammatical approach Poplack suggests that “code-switching, rather than representing a debasement of linguistic skill, is actually a sensitive indicator of bilingual ability” (1980, p.581). Others even do further research in order to acknowledge the ideological values of this bilingual behavior (Salzmann & Auer, 2000). Thus, Muysken (1995) strongly advocates that there are significant effects related to the characteristics of the contributing varieties and the combination of more or less closely related languages – different pairings provide different opportunities and difficulties at a linguistic, and in particular at a syntactic level. Similarly, the study of webblogs, or blogging, or blogs, has welcomed various opportunities for novice researchers and experienced scholars alike. Webblog (blogs), a social media network, is the online platform and technology that people use to build social networks by communicating with others via sharing experiences, opinions, insights and perceptions. Blogging as an online activity has been 2 increasing exponential since mid-1999 and fueled by reports from the mainstream media of the grassroots power of blogs as alternative news sources (Huffaker & Calvert, 2006). Thus, blogs are well suited to serve as on-line personal journals. Pinkman (2005) [cited in (San, 2009, p.30)] indicates that blogging becomes communicative and interactive when participants assume multiple roles in the writing process, as writers who write and post, as readers/reviewers who respond to other writers‟ posts, and as writer-readers who, returning to their own posts, react to criticism of their own posts. Although blogs can be placed in secured environments, readers in turn can comment on what they read. The act of self-publishing in blogs encourages ownership and responsibility of the writers, who may be more thoughtful (in content and structure) if they know they are writing for a real audience. It is considered ideal to create blog as a means of studying, sharing or self-expressing. Alternatively, following others‟ personal pages would also be more intriguing than creating one‟s own. Such cases are often in evidence when blogging is by no means a new method of communicating among young people but a shared community where people of certain expertise write about topic-related issues. Beauty bloggers, in this sense, have emerged in a follow suit. Given the fact that the majority of blog entries by beauty bloggers are in Vietnamese, English can be often seen at various points. Blogs‟ owners are often in their mid-20s and early 30s, which associates with the fact that they were relatively around 1980s and 1990s-born – the time when English has already been introduced to Vietnam as a mandatory subject, and students are required to study English from early ages. Apparently, throughout their blog entries, the phenomenon of language contacting between English and Vietnamese does frequently occur. This is the reason why the research aims at investigating the behavior of code-switching in the context of webblogs among Vietnamese beauty bloggers community. 1.2. Aims and objectives As within the small scale of a minor thesis in applied linguistics, the research is obviously incapable of covering a large scale of every single blog and blog entry in 3 the beauty community in Vietnam. This study, however, focuses more on generally well-received blogs generated by widely accepted beauty writers aged 25-35 (the quality of well-received is defined by the number of followers in each page – averagely 10,000 and above). Additionally, for the collecting data of the study to be conducted thoroughly, entries with the occurrence of code-switch rather than randomly chronological posts are chosen as the primary material for valid and reliable linguistic analysis. This minor study aims to discover Vietnamese-English switching performances available in blogs created by popular and well-followed beauty bloggers in Vietnam. In other words, typical patterns of structurally-engaged and socially-motivated code-switching will be investigated. Therefore, the study is to answer the following question: How is Vietnamese-English code-switching in blogs written by selected beauty bloggers presented? In particular, two sub-questions derived from the research question are going to be answered and explained: (1) What linguistic patterns do the switches present? (2) What functions do the switches serve? 1.3. Scope of the thesis First, beauty bloggers community is a huge network consisting of mostly people aged between 25 and 35 with determined passion and enthusiasm in creating confident and fashionable look. This community is millions worldwide, making it a large society influencing both locally and internationally. According to roughly made statistics, the number of bloggers worldwide have reached around 500 million, among which beauty bloggers should account for a large portion. A beauty blogger would often have their own channels on several different platforms, namely Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, or Twitter, where they update brief updates, realtime status and images to followers and a personal blog page where written forms 4 are done more thoroughly and intensively. Within the scope of this study, only written entries on personal webpage are employed for research and analysis. Any vlogs (or video blogs, another form of doing blogging through Youtube channel) or status updates (another form of written entries carried out primarily on Facebook and Instagram) would not be considered proper for the study, which might open doors to various other studies. Secondly, in Vietnam, beauty bloggers, sometimes are referred to as social influencers or beauty gurus, are many in number. This quantity may reach as high as hundred people. In order to secure the validity and reliability that the researcher can commit, a total number of five popular candidates is considered to be feasible and more compatible. All in all, the main subject of this study is written journals/ entries on blog pages completed by bloggers in beauty industry with 10,000 followers or more. A collection of posts in which the alternation between Vietnamese and English occurs will be examined accordingly. 1.4. Method of the thesis The study intends to follow the approach of qualitative orientation with discussions and explanations being the most significant part, centering around the purpose of providing insights into the issue. Quantitative analysis, however, also plays an indispensable role in implementing such intention. To start with, due to the small scale of the research, the subjects are five beauty bloggers (criteria for selecting these five would be thoroughly considered and illustrated in chapter 3). These beauty workers are from 20 to 35 years of age, having worked intensively in the field of writing and promoting beauty products for a certain time period; and having a large number of followers on their fan page (mainly on their Facebook page, a popular social platform as mentioned previously). Their written (not videos or Vlog) reviews on their pages will be the key subject of the study. These five beauty bloggers, first, would have agreed in advance as to whether they are willing to allow their entries to be collected as data 5 for the research; and second, would be renamed for the ethical purpose of doing research. As bloggers are as productive as they could in producing at least one entry per week, the number of posts and entries would have reached hundreds, rendering it a great amount of data for the feasibility of the study. Thus, a collection of ten written texts involving code-switching from each author will be retrieved regardless of their chronological order and length. Topical theme for each entry is as diversified as the blogger could go, which means providing that there exists language alternation in the entry, that entry would qualify for the data analysis. This would open more room for data collection and result discussion. All of the entries collected for the study were originally produced in the form of personal journals, so another important step is to code the entries accordingly with the authors. This is to secure confidentiality for the blog owners. This stage would be followed by the analyzing process by using tokenization and pos-tagging tool to categorize switches into major parts of speech, namely nouns, verbs, adjectives, and others. Tabulated data will then be converted into charts for visual illustrations and elaboration. Results will be presented with supplementary charts and illustrations, followed by in-depth analysis and discussion. 1.5. Design and structure This thesis is organized into the following chapters: Chapter 1 introduces the background, the aims and scope, the research method and structure of the study. Chapter 2 focuses on the literature review of different approaches to codeswitching and its closely related term code-mixing and borrowing in the context of bilingual and multilingual community. In this chapter, the researcher also provides a broad picture of what has been researched regarding the topic of code-switching and blogging in the academic setting. 6 Chapter 3 presents the methodology issues including the subjects of the study and the subject selection criteria, data collection procedures, and the data analysis process. Chapter 4 describes and discusses major findings involving the presentation of Vietnamese-English code-switching in journal blogs for the purpose of promoting and reviewing beauty products and beauty tips. Underlying social functions for the employment of such language alternation method would also be presented and explained accordingly. Chapter 5 delivers the conclusion for the thesis including summary of major findings, the study‟s significance, followed by implications and suggestions for further research studies in the same area. 7 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW This chapter discusses in detail a review of the literature on the topic of codeswitching. The first section of the chapter is assigned to clarify several key definitions regarding language varieties, bilingualism, and the central term of codeswitching in companion with its frequently-confused counterpart, borrowing. The second part, which is also the emphasis of the chapter, is dedicated to describing and explaining major theoretical frameworks about code-switching from both structural and sociolinguistic approaches, followed by the researcher‟s comment and summary on which framework is applied for the study. Last section of the chapter provides a more dimensional view on the picture of researching about CS from various contexts and purposes. A concluding segment is then drawn upon previous frameworks and studies to close the chapter. 2.1. Definitions of Key Terms As with any aspect of language contact phenomena, research on code-switching is flooded by the thorny issue of terminological confusion. Apparently, not all researchers use the same terms in the very same way as their approach varies, nor do they agree on the scope covered by terms such as code-switching, code-mixing, borrowing, or lexical borrowing. In particular, there has been the perceived distinction between the terms code-switching and borrowing on the one hand and code-switching and code-mixing on the other. Several criteria have been proposed to distinguish between these two pairs of concepts which will be illustrated in the later part of this chapter. Thus, before looking at them more closely in the next section, a consideration of the definitions of some basic terms in language contact would be of immediate necessity. 2.1.1. Code as Language Variety The term varieties, as Wei Li (2013) puts it is a catch-all term which covers different languages, dialects, accents, registers and styles speech (Wei, p.156). The 8 author of the book Applied Linguistics also stated that language varieties can be grouped into written or spoken categories, standard or non-standard ones, or can be varieties used for communication between people who do not share a mother tongue or varieties that develop between people who have no common language at all. For this research, the term of language varieties is exactly what has stated above. It is certain that the study of language alternation, or in this case is code-switching, has been resourceful over the past several decades. In one single search-click on academic works related to the subject, there appear over 86,000 search results in the database of . As (Nilep, 2006, p.2) has put it in his overview “the term code-switching has been based on a strict identification between the notions of code and linguistics variety, be that a language, dialect, style, or prosodic register.” This view was also agreed upon by other authors when the term code is described as a relatively neutral conceptualization of a linguistic variety. In short, the term code used in this research generally refers to a specific language variety, which in this case are Vietnamese and English language. 2.1.2. Code-switching Many attempts have been made in settling a most agreed-upon definition for the term of code-switching. To name a few are Sridhar & Sridhar (1980), Poplack (1980), Gumperz (1982), Myers-Scotton (1993), Milroy and Muysken (2000), Gardner-Chloros (2010), and Bell, A. (2014). The most general definition of codeswitching is “the alternate use of two languages or linguistic varieties within the same utterance or during the same conversation” (Hoffmann, 1991, p. 110). In sociolinguistic branch, each dialect can be seen as a language code. In this perspective, code-switching is identified by Gardner-Chloros (2010) as “the use of several language dialects in the same conversation or sentence by bilingual people” (p. 4). Similarly, code-switching is used to refer to the phenomenon in which “speakers switch backwards and forwards between distinct codes in their 9 repertoire” (Bell, 2014, p. 111). This author also considered code-switching to be a complex and skillful type of language choice, which involves the accomplished handling of two or more languages simultaneously – structurally, psychologically and socially. By means of juxtaposition, i.e., elements of different languages put next to each other, Gumperz (1982) defines conversational code-switching as “the juxtaposition within the same speech exchange of passages of speech belonging to two different systems or subsystems” (Gumperz, 1982, p. 59). Muysken (2000) prefers using other terms, “insertion” and “alternation” to refer to the process of mixing elements from different languages (p. 1), whereas refers to code-switching as “the rapid succession of several languages in a single speech event”. MyersScotton (1993) believes that insertion is one form of borrowing, in which the difference, if any, between mixing and borrowing is the size and type of the element inserted. Meanwhile, Poplack (1980) views alternation as the switching of codes between turns or utterances. This research adopted Poplack‟s 2001 revisited definition of CS in her review on the linguistic study of code-switching included in the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences as follow: “the alternation, by bilinguals (or multilinguals), of two or more languages in discourse, often with no change of interlocutor or topic. And that such alternation may take place at any level of linguistic structure, but its occurrence within the confines of a single sentence, constituent or even word.” (Poplack, 2001, p.2062) 2.1.3. Code-switching and Code-mixing Code-switching (CS) and code-mixing (CM) are most important features and wellstudied speech processes in multilingual communities. A frequently made distinction between code-switching and code-mixing has been conducted over and over through decades, though the line has been drawn in different ways. Definitions 10