CODE-SWITCHING IN COMMENTS ON SLOVENE INTERNET JOURNALISTIC ARTICLESKrošelj, Andreja (Avtor) Šabec, Nada (Mentor) code-switchingborrowingInternet commentsbilingualismNetspeakgrammar of spoken discourseCode-switching is one of the possible linguistic outcomes in a bilingual/multilingual environment. Despite the lack of consensus among linguists about terminology definition, most agree on the fundamental difference between borrowing and code-switching; the latter requiring a complete switch to L2. This diploma paper discusses code-switching in comments on Slovene Internet journalistic articles. In the empirical section, forty-five comments on twenty-five Slovene Internet journalistic articles were analysed. The research had two main objectives; the first one was to establish which language contact phenomena the examples represent according to various definitions, and to determine terminology used in further analysis with its accompanying definitions. The second goal was to discover characteristics of code-switching in Internet comments, including listing the topics most frequently commented when using code-switching, and languages commentators have switch to, naming the reasons for switching, and describing grammatical characteristics of switches. The results have shown that the line between borrowing and intrasentential code-switching is not always clear cut. Intersentential code-switching has proven to be the most frequent type of switching. Music, politics and entertainment industry are topics most frequently commented by using code-switching. English being lingua franca of the Internet has proven to be also the language commentators most frequently switched to. Switches, often triggered by the topic and/or style of writing of the commented texts, communicate something beyond the superficial meaning of their words. In most cases, more than one reason for such behaviour can be assigned to an individual example. Grammatical analysis has shown that comments, often written in Netspeak, possess many grammatical features of spoken discourse.[A. Krošelj]20152015-06-04 00:25:03Diplomsko delo48261sl