A Study On Chinese-english Code-switching In Public Service Advertisements As Realization Of Adaptation

As a medium of cultural transmission, Public Service Advertisement is hailed as a window displaying national culture of a nation, and it enjoys the reputation of being an outstanding exotic flower in the advertising garden. In general, Public Service Advertisement aims at spreading the ethical spirits of civilization and carrying forward ethics and morality so as to admonish and moralize people, in order that people will show enthusiasm in promoting public welfare. Thus, the language of PSAs should be distinctive and eye-catching. Besides, as the most active tool in mass media, its language can always reflect various changes and developments of social economy, culture and education, and further, it is regarded as a mirror that can vividly embody the dynamic nature of language. With the further development of China's reform and opening to the outside world and the increasingly frequent economic and cultural contacts between countries, code-switching, as the natural consequence of language contact, becomes an inevitable phenomenon in PSA discourse.Since the 1970s, a number of linguists have lunched researches into code-switching from different perspectives, such as sociolinguistics, grammatical study, discourse analysis, psychological linguistics, and etc. And accordingly, fruitful achievements have been yielded. It is expected that the more explanatory perspective can interpret and explore the various factors behind the code-switching phenomenon, which cover the linguistic, sociological, cultural, and cognitive factors. Comparatively speaking, Verschueren's pragmatic perspective is generally believed to be more comprehensive and carry more explanation strengths. Verschueren defines pragmatics as a general cognitive, social, and cultural perspective on linguistic phenomena in relation to their usage in forms of behavior (Verschueren, 2000). Based on the adaptation theory under the framework of Verschueren's pragmatic perspective, the present study intends to conduct a detailed analysis and discussion of the Chinese-English code-switching in PSA discourses. The research is carried out from angles of linguistic reality, social conventions, psychological motivations and advertising discourse features.The present research takes altogether 126 PSAs as the study samples, which are chosen from the source corpus of 1398 PSA submitted for National Excellent PSA Selection Campaign. Taking Verschueren's adaptation theory as theoretical base and support, applying both qualitative and quantitative research method, the present study conducts a systematic and profound analysis and discussion on the Chinese-English code-switching phenomena and its adaptability in the PSA discourses. The research aims at exploring the types of code-switchings in PSAs, the patterns the code-switching will adapt to and the pragmatic functions the Chinese-English code-switching can realize. And then, the adapting necessity and importance of code-switching in PSAs are to be expounded and proved.Through the detailed analysis of the samples, the present study reveals that, in terms of linguistic structure, the Chinese-English code-switchings in Chinese PSA discourses can be categorized into three types: insertional code-switching, alternational code-switching and diglossia code-switching; in terms of linguistic performance, the main reason advertisers exploit Chinese-English code-switching in the PSA discourses is to adapt to the linguistic reality, social conventions, psychological motivations and AIDA model which exclusively belongs to the PSA discourses. Moreover, the study also reveals that, in the process of adaptation, code-switching can realize various pragmatic functions, such as lexical gap filling, emotional appeal, decoration, explanation, emphasizing, attention-drawing and so on. In fact, these pragmatic functions can enable the PSAs realize their edutainment goals in a quiet and graceful way. To a certain degree, the present research has proved and developed Linguistic Adaptation Model proposed by Yu Guodong in 2001, and in addition, it puts forward a special adaptation model for the PSA discourse.Through the analysis and discussion on the adaptation of the Chinese-English code-switching in PSAs, this study can call people's attention and concern to the phenomenon of code-switching in media languages so as to be aware and comprehend its various pragmatic functions in social communication. It is sincerely hoped that the research findings of the present study can provide some beneficial references for the advertising copywriters, so that they can lay emphasis on drawing advanced designing concept from the successful PSAs, thereby, to improve the persuasive and attractive power of PSAs and realize the"publicizing widely"goal of advertisements. What's more, it is also hoped that this study can shed light on exploiting code-switching strategy in people'everyday language performance, so that the positive factors of code-switching can be made full use of and the adverse factors can be eliminated so as to realize the communicative goals more effectively.