Social Linguistic Research And Analysis On The Signs Of Chinese Restaurants In New York City

Based on the concepts of social linguistic and cultural phenomenon and the theories from integrated corpus linguistics, the paper conducts field investigations of large scale on the names and signs of Chinese restaurants in three areas in New York City with the method of sample survey and questionnaire.The paper focuses on the clarity, lucre, culture and especially, the particularity of the names and signs of oversea Chinese restaurants. Many scholars have conducted similar researches in China—field investigations on the names of restaurants in the aim of establishing a theory model to evaluate the social linguistic life, but this research mostly focuses on investigating the names of Chinese restaurants in China. Yet, researchers haven't paid much attention to the names and signs of oversea Chinese restaurants. The paper conducts a study of the names and sign of Chinese restaurants in New York City, based on which the paper further its study by a linguistic comparison and a social-linguistic analysis in order to find out the relative factors behind the words of names and signs of those restaurants.Three residential areas are chosen for the study of the paper:Flushing, Chinatown and Brooklyn because they are in different stages of development. With the comparison among the names and sings of Chinese restaurants in the three areas, the paper reveals the chronological change of the names and signs, the influence of western culture on them, the maintenance of Chinese feature on them and the connection of the Chinese name and English name of those restaurants.Two investigations were conducted for the paper. In the first one, pictures were taken of both the Chinese and English names and sign of 352 restaurants, followed by interviews of the owners of some of the restaurants for the reason why certain names were given to their restaurants. In the second investigation, questionnaires were used to collect the impression and psychological reaction to the names and signs of restaurants of customers who came to the restaurants for the first time.In the first investigation, the Chinese and English texts of the names and sign of Chinese restaurants were collected and the interviews reveals that most restaurant owners don't think the name of their of their restaurants are related to their business and that they don't think it's important to have any connection between the Chinese and English name of their restaurant.The second investigation shows that there are 54 Chinese customers and 10 western customers who pay attention to the names of the Chinese restaurants. There are 118 Chinese customers and 72 western customers who do not pay attention to the names of the Chinese restaurants. There are 27 Chinese customers and 29 western customers who sometimes pay attention to the signs of Chinese restaurants. The evidence shows that more than half of the customers do not pay attention to the signs of Chinese restaurants. Also, there are 20 Chinese customers and 8 western customers that revealed that they are attracted by the signs of the restaurants. There are 176 Chinese customers and 96 western customers who revealed that they come to the restaurant not because of the signs. The results show that there are 272 customers who come to restaurants not because they are attracted by the signs of the restaurants. This number is more than half of the total number of the customers. Therefore, we conclude that the business of the restaurants does not relate to the signs of the restaurants.