A Study Of Chinese-English Code-switching In Advertising Discourse

Language is the tool for human communication. It comes into being and develops along with the human society. In 21st century, different speech communities come across more frequent contacts for the political, economic and cultural purposes, which unavoidably lead to the language contact. As one of this kind of phenomenon, codeswitching frequently appears in daily communications of native bilingual or multilingual communities. Since our introduction of reform and open policy, Chinese-English codeswitching is a common occurrence in people's daily conversations in Hang Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Mainland China and even in official newspapers, magazines, radios and TVs. In recent years, the Chinese-English codeswitching rushes into Chinese advertising discourse.Since 1970s, a number of linguists lunched various researches to this subject from the aspects of sociolinguistics, conversational analysis, psychological linguistics etc. However, these researches are mostly localized in bilingual communities, and few studies have been carried out in monolingual China especially in the field of ads except Prof. Huang Guowen, who is from the Foreign Languages Department of Zhongshan University, and who analyzes Chinese-English codeswitching from the angle of discourse analysis. Besides his approach, the author, in this paper, finds that the Chinese-English codeswitching in advertising discourse can also be studied under the frameworks of pragmatics.Based on the findings of the previous researches, the author of this thesis has further studied the Chinese-English codeswitching appearing in advertising discourse. Firstly, she analyzes the types of Chinese-English codeswitching under the framework of Myers-Scotton's MLF model. Then she explains why the advertisers adopt Chinese-English codeswitching in ads with Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, which was put forward in his book The Understanding of Pragmatics published in 1999.Through the research, the author has found: (1) In terms of the linguistic structure, the Chinese-English codeswitching in Chinese advertising discourse can becategorized into three types: insertional codeswitching, alternational codeswitching and diglossia codeswitching. Moreover, the insertional codeswitching can be further divided into phonological insertion, lexical and phrasal insertion, and clausal insertion as well as the discourse insertion. At the same time, the advertising discourse in which there is codeswitching consists of the matrix language (ML) and the embedded language (EL). As for the Chinese discourse, Chinese is the ML, while English is the EL. (2) In terms of the linguistic choice, the main reason advertisers adopt the Chinese-English codeswitching is to adapt to the linguistic reality, social conventions and the psychological motivations. The Chinese-English codeswitching as adaptation to the linguistic reality mainly refers to the advertisers' adaptation to the linguistic existence and linguistic feature. The Chinese-English codeswitching as adaptation to the social conventions mainly means the advertisers adapt to our social culture. The advertisers' consciousness in abidance to the social conventions is normally much higher, because they understand the economic troubles caused by violations of social conventions are very serious. The Chinese-English codeswitching as adaptation to the psychological motivations is another important strategy the advertisers use. With the application of this adaptation, the Chinese-English codeswitchings have performed the following functions: foreign flavor gaining, AIDA realization, emphasis, discriminating, explanation, authenticity keeping, convenience, and decoration etc.