Chinese-English Codeswitching In Advertisements Of China's Mass Media

Language is the product of human civilization and development, and it at the same time directly reflects people's activities and social conditions. Media Language, as the most active tool in communication, is undoubtedly serving as a mirror refracting change and development of language under a certain condition of social economy, culture and education etc. In recent years Chinese-English codeswitching has come to be a new phenomenon widely occurring on China's mass media. At present, the studies on it remain at a rudimentary stage. Researches made by western scholars are mostly localized in analysis of conversational codeswitching patterns of ethnic minority groups or those found in the former colonies. However, little attention has been paid to the phenomena of codeswitching applications to some specific fields such as advertisements, literary works, or business documents. It is worth mentioning here that some researchers in Hong Kong (e.g. Chan, 1993; Li, 1996, 2000; Luke, 1984,1992; etc.) have made quite a lot contributions in introducing new theories on codeswitching and exploring Hong Kong's bilingual and multilingual phenomena, however, little has been devoted to the studies of codeswitching ads on mass media in inland China, which has become a common occurrence with the rapid growth of China's economy. In this aspect, Prof. Huang Guowen is the only researcher in inland China who is the first to address the phenomena of codeswitching in ads on China's media. He covers in his studies both switchings between a Chinese dialect (Cantonese) and standard Chinese, and between Chinese and English. From the perspective of discourse analysis he gives a brief description of the types of switching and discusses the reasons for their being. However, as I approached to this field, I found that studies specially dedicated to the discussions of Chinese-English codeswitching on China's media were still in blank. Discussions of the structures and types of Chinese-English codeswitching, its functions and motivations, problems and solutions remain opened for further exploration and discussion.After analyzing and comparing several theories on constraints and types of codeswitching, it is found that the theories of Free Morpheme Constraint and Equivalence Constraint cannot adequately account for structures and types of Chinese-English codeswitching. Facts show that 'Matrix Language Frame Model' (MLFM) put forward by Myers-Scotton (1993) is a much sounder system. Thus on the basis of MLFM Chinese-English codeswitching can be grouped as three types of inter-sentential codeswitching, intra-sentential codeswitching and diglossia codeswitching with sub-branches under each of them.This study also indicates that Chinese-English codeswitching in ads of China's mass media on the one hand shares some of its common motivations as in conversational analysis, and on the other hand as an advertising strategy it also shows the features of advertisement stylistics. From a micro-perspective view, it enjoys functions of emphasis, elaboration, decoration, explanation and selection etc.. In macro-perspective views, the popularity of codeswitching in ads reveals people's psychological tendencies of westernization worship and language superiority admiration; in terms of ads plotting, code choice is usually employed as an effective strategy to call people's attention so as to fulfill the advertising tasks. In addition, Markedness theory further explains how copywriters use implicatory meanings a code itself conveys to affect the target audience's understanding of copywriters' purposes and intentions.Codeswitching is the natural consequence of cultural exchange and language contact. As one of advertising strategies it has undoubtedly enriched China's media language. However, there areindeed some problems involving English grammatical mistakes or mistranslations which do bring us negative influences. Solutions suggest that actions such as advocating correct English, rectifying cheatings in advertising and setting up correct consuming...