Browsing by Author "Turner, Melissa"

It has been frequently proven that both bilinguals and language learners code-switch successfully for a variety of functions such as showing familiarity with a community of practice a group that collaborates regularly in some common venture. But what about those who have not learnt the language? Do they code-switch? Do they code-switch differently to language learners? How are they able to code-switch successfully and why would they want to at all? This thesis examined the Japanese-English code-switching in fanfiction based in the Japanese fandom Kuroshitsuji ( Black Butler ) of those who had learnt Japanese at an educational institute (Learners) and those who had not (Non-Learners) as well those who had only learnt Japanese outside of educational institutes (Active Non-Learners) and those who had not learnt it at all (Passive Non-Learners). Using corpus linguistic techniques, the concordance tool AntConc and a log-likelihood calculator, it was found that Learners and Non-Learners code-switched in a very similar way, not only in frequency but also code-switch distribution. However, Active Non-Learners and Passive Non-Learners code-switched very differently. Canon Type (e.g. the anime with fan-translated subtitles vs the anime with official English subtitles) was also examined and it was found that canon type may have had an influence on the code-switching of Non-Learners. To examine why these code-switch patterns occurred, questionnaires were sent to the authors to ask about their code-switch attitudes. Although it was difficult to make connections between the author attitudes and the code-switch frequency patterns it was found that community of practice played an important role in code-switch decisions whether it be in a positive or negative way. This thesis was created in the hope that it would help to broaden code-switching research by using different Learner types and written over spoken material. Using the plethora of negative attitudes found in the author questionnaire responses it was shown that it is important to combat these attitudes and it is hoped that further research would continue to fight against these especially in the field of second language acquisition.