Why ‘hi’, ‘bye’ and ‘sorry’ are preferred in Chinese-Chinese bilingual interactions in Hong Kong and Taiwan: A comparative study

This paper reports a number of findings in a large-scale project with the primary objective of comparing motivations of code-mixing (or intra-sentential code-switching) in two Chinese-dominant societies: Hong Kong and Taiwan. The project is a replication of Li and Tse’s (2002) experimental study involving 12 English majors in Hong Kong (see http://personal.cityu.edu.hk/~endavidl/index3.htm for details). Participants’ self-report data indicate a general preference of hi, bye and sorry for expressing three speech acts, respectively: (a) greetings, (b) saying good-bye, and (c) apologizing. The main goal of this paper is to report why hi, bye and sorry are preferred to their putative translation equivalents or indigenized renditions in the bilingual speech of educated Chinese speakers in Hong Kong and Taiwan.