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Cantonese‐English code‐switching in Cantopop television drama theme songs
Author(s) -
Ng Chi Wui
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
world englishes
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.6
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1467-971X
pISSN - 0883-2919
DOI - 10.1111/weng.12466
Subject(s) - lyrics , code switching , theme (computing) , drama , code (set theory) , literature , linguistics , art , history , computer science , philosophy , set (abstract data type) , programming language , operating system
Popular music is a genre of text that has been prevalently studied in code‐switching research across the globe in recent decades. Following up Chan's (2009) study on Cantonese‐English code‐switching in Cantopop released between 1970s and 2003, the present study is a corpus‐assisted discourse analysis investigating linguistic‐pragmatic functions performed by code‐switching in Cantopop television drama theme songs released in the past decade. Lyrics of television theme songs released in Hong Kong between 2009 and 2018 with code‐switching were collected and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Functions uncovered in the study were discovered to be akin to those unveiled in Chan (2009) save that motivations for incorporation of code‐switching into lyrics of television theme songs were found to be specific to themes or genres of television dramas.