STRUCTURE, SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS OF CODE-SWITCHING IN THE SPEECH OF SECONDARY SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

Abstract

Code-switching is a complex phenomenon that varies in structure, semantics and pragmatics in different communicative situations. The aim of the study is to identify structural, semantic and pragmatic characteristics of code-switching in the speech of Russian schoolchildren and University students learning English and German as foreign languages. The data are 157 utterances containing 165 code switches extracted from oral spontaneous speech of 16 schoolchildren and 16 University students. Their bilingual speech samples were collected by means of non-participant observation and fixed with the help of voice-recorder for 32 hours (16 for schoolchildren and 16 for University students) from October till December, 2021. Comparative analysis was used as the main method to interpret the features of schoolchildren’ and University students’ code-switching. The results of the research demonstrated that the most productive for schoolchildren were insertions proper and bare forms performing message-oriented pragmatic function and intended to denote school objects associated with English classes. For University students most frequent structures were classical switches in the form of insertions proper performing message-oriented pragmatic function. Semantically, code-switches among University students were more complicated since they were intended not only to denote specific University objects, but also to express stylistically relevant shades of meaning. Though code-switching has already been studied within various frameworks, the correlation between structural, pragmatic and semantic characteristics of code-switching in the speech of Russian-speaking school and University students has been under-researched, which provides originality of the present work.