A Study Of Chinese-English Code-switching In Advertising Discourse-from The Perspectives Of Sociolinguistics And Pragmatics

In the 21th century, with the development of globalization and modernization, different countries have a closer and closer relationship with each other on such aspects as politics, economy and culture and so on, so do the language contacts. Code-switching is a phenomenon arising from language contacts. Since the implementation of China's reform and opening-up policy, Chinese-English code-switching is a more and more frequent phenomenon in mass media, especially in magazines and newspapers, which has drawn much attention from linguists.This thesis intends to study the Chinese-English code-switching in advertising discourse from the perspectives of sociolinguistics and pragmatics. The data for analysis mainly include advertisements appearing in popular magazines, newspapers and on TV in mainland. The author conducts this study by using Myers-Scotton's MLF model and Verchueren's adaptation theory.Through the analysis, the author has found:first, she has categorized the types of code-switching in Chinese advertising discourse, namely, inserted code-switching, alternative code-switching and diglossia code-switching. Specifically speaking, inserted code-switching can be subcategorized into phonological insertion, lexical and phrasal insertion, clausal insertion and discourse insertion. Besides, the advertising discourse involving code-switching is made up of the matrix language and the embedded language. In the Chinese advertising discourse, Chinese is the matrix language, while English is the embedded language. Second, the author has investigated the reasons why advertisers adopt Chinese-English code-switching in advertising discourse. It has been found that they do this in order to adapt to linguistic reality, social conventions and psychological motivations. The Chinese-English code-switching adapts to linguistic reality mainly refers to advertisers'adaptation to linguistic facts and linguistic features, because the languages involved in code-switching have discrepancies in their range of applications and semantic meanings. The Chinese-English code-switching adapts to social conventions mainly means that advertisers should adapt to social culture, because advertising discourse is restricted by social culture and it has an influence on social culture. Besides, Advertisers must try to satisfy their customers'psychological needs by using Chinese-English code-switching in order to realize functions of this phenomenon in advertising discourse, such as the foreign flavor gaining function, the humor-creating function, the emphasis function, the explanation function and the decoration function and so forth.