Abstract
ABSTRACT With increasing liberalization and democratization of Taiwan, various code-switching (hereafter CS) has swiftly become one of the favored modes of communication in our daily conversation. CS, an alternative use of more than one language in discourse, is a salient characteristic, especially in the election period. The present research investigates the occurrence of CS in the political discourse among the three presidential candidates via televised election debates by taking up the qualitative approach in examining the various functions and reasons for CS. We adopt the method because the goals of qualitative research typically involve understanding a phenomenon from the points of view of the participants (or candidates in this paper). These goals largely are lost when textual data are quantified and aggregated (Maxwell, 1996). The data consist of CS utterances of Mandarin, Southern Min, Hakka and English multilingual candidates in Taiwan and is analyzed based on Malik’s (1994) ten reasons for CS. The findings suggest that CS would occur in campaign discourse mainly to serve the functions of phatic communion, playing with Taiwanese phrases, quotation, reiteration, and attention attraction. For more substantial results in the future, researchers may consider larger numbers of participants to observe the occurrence of CS in different types of elections to gain a more systematic generalization.