Linguistic Analysis Of Shop Names In German And Chinese

Nowadays, the ubiquitous advertisements have been closely connected with all aspects of social life. From traditional advertisements in newspapers and television, to advertising with leaflets on the street and to advertisements all over the new media Internet: different forms of advertising convey a variety of information through all kinds of media. Various shop names and signboards which serve as the carrier of the shop names are essentially also a form of advertising. As the sign of shops and stores, shops names not only need to transmit information about products, but also to fulfill other functions of advertising, such as affecting psychological activity of consumers guiding consuming behavior etc. In addition, shop names carry a variety of cultural elements and can reflect the spiritual civilization of the society. By comparing shop names in German and Chinese, the present paper intends to find out the conventions and tendencies about name-giving and signboard-designing for shops in the two countries, to reveal the cultural elements implied in shop names, hoping to provide some guidance for the name-giving of German and Chinese Shops, especially the transnational or intercultural shops.In Chinese linguistic research, the study of the language in shop names has already attracted the attention and been included in the framework of advertising language studies by many scholars. Qian Li and Wang Junyuan have performed a systematic and comprehensive analysis of shop names in their monograph "The Language of Shop Names". A lot of master theses and doctoral theses also have focuses on this topic of shop names which involves a variety fields such as language, psychology and culture. However, there are not so many special researches about shop names in German linguistic studies. Therefore, the analysis on language forms of shop names is mainly based on researches about advertising language and traditional methods of linguistic analysis are also referred to as a help to develop the own framework of this paper. The present paper has collected about150shops names from each side (from the Chinese city Nanjing and the German city Goettingen) as text material and carries on the analysis successively from different aspects such as language forms, rhetorical characters and cultural imprints. Some problems which may concern the form and content of German and Chinese shop names are also pointed out in this paper.In the part of linguistic analysis, the paper focuses mainly on the phonetic and phonological character, phrase structure and the source of word in collected German and Chinese shop names. From the distribution of all shop names according to their length, we can find out that both German and Chinese shop names possess an optimal length which is conducive to the transmission of information and also suitable for a successful acceptance among the public. In the phonetic and phonological aspect, the Chinese shop names use the combination of level tones and oblique tones to achieve their rhythmical effects, while the phonological characteristics of the German shop names lie in the combination of different vowel types. The syntactic research mainly focuses on the parts of speech and phrase structure and the analysis on sources of words intends to explore the reflection of society, culture etc. in the language of shop names, for example, there are a large number of foreign words in shop names.The basic linguistic observation is then followed by a further analysis of rhetorical characteristics of shop names. Besides the rhetoric figures such as rhyme, metaphor, personification, the use of wordplays in shop names of both countries is the emphasis of this chapter. The paper also tries to describe the visual effects of signboards like typefaces of the name, colors and graphic elements.From the analysis of the language form, cultural elements etc., we can draw a conclusion that the name-giving and signboard designing of Chinese shops are more flexible and diverse than German shops.