English-Chinese Code-switching In Advertising From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Code-switching is the alternating use of two or more languages by bilingual ormultilingual speakers within one conversational episode, either in the sameconversational turn or in consecutive turns (Auer,1998). It is a common phenomenonin language, culture contact and cross cultural communication. Code-switching as acommon phenomenon of language contact and a kind of effective strategies forlanguage communicative, more and more appears in public life. In recent years, withthe rapid development of China’s automobile industry, automobile advertisement hasgradually attracted people’s attention as an important way to promote products,publicize brand and propagate ideas. English-Chinese code-witching, as a languageexpression form, has appeared with high frequencies. Therefore, the research ofcode-switching in auto advertising will provide us precious materials for the study onthe functions of code-switching. This article will research the application ofChinese-English code-switching in automobile advertising from the perspective ofadaptation theory. Although there are scholars from the angle of language features,rhetoric, discourse analysis have studied advertisements, the systematic research ofautomobile advertising language is few in Chinese market. And most of them are nopertinence.The thesis regards Verschueren’s Linguistic Adaptation Theory and YuGuodong’s adaptation model of code-switching as the theoretical foundation,combining qualitative method with quantitative method, analyzing100automobileadvertising language collected from newspapers, magazines, promotional pages andnetwork to further explore corpus code-switching in adaptation to linguistic reality,social conventions and psychological motivations. At the same time, in light ofcode-switching type proposed by Mysken to classify and study code-switching in autoadvertising. The paper, combined with specific examples of automobile advertising,aims to answer the following questions: what are the different types ofEnglish-Chinese code-switching in Chinese automobile advertising; how is theEnglish-Chinese code-switching adapted to linguistic reality, social conventions and psychological motivations in automobile advertising according to adaptation theory.Based on the research and analysis of corpus, this paper found1) According toYu Guodong code-switching model of adaptation, automobile advertising languageuse Chinese-English code-switching, mainly in order to realize the adaptation tolinguistic reality, social conventions and psychological motivations. English-Chinesecode-switching adaptation to linguistic reality is car advertisement adapt toprecision-making and fill lexical gap. Chinese-English code-switching adaptation tosocial conventions is car advertising adapt to customers’ consumption culture,consumers’ aesthetic conception, the expectations of consumers. Adaptation to thepsychological motivations is the automobile advertising adapt to consumers’psychology of pursuit of fashion, identity-establishing, performance requirements,philosophy of life, environmental and health. Code-switching, as realization oflinguistic adaptation, in essence suits Verschueren’s adaptation theory of physicalworld, social world and mental world. From the collected corpus, we find thatadaptation to mental motivations of English-Chinese code-switching possesses thelargest proportion and frequency of code-switching as the pursuit philosophy of life,due to people increasingly seek to quality of life. And adaptation to the socialconventions ranks the second largest and the ad strategies are much more to meetcustomers’ expectation with a percentage of20%. We also find that the boundaries ofthe linguistic reality, social conventions, psychological motivations most times don’tdraw very well. Hence, any kind of analysis of code-switching should take intoaccount the three kinds of adaptation factors.2) China market automotive advertisinglanguage code-switching converted into insertion code-switching, alternatingcode-switching, congruent lexicalization code-switching, and the insertioncode-switching includes letter or letters insertion, phrases insertion, word insertion,clause insertion. Based on the corpus, we can come to the conclusion that insertiontakes up the vast majority while the proportion of congruent lexicalization is the least.From the units of Chinese-English code-switching in auto advertising, the form ofletter/letters’ occurrence frequency is most while phrase and clause is slightly lowerthan letter/letters and word, as a result of the advertising space requirements. We also found that the letter or letter combinations and words are often used pun rhetoric, withthe simplest language to convey rich information, so that advertising brief but exciting.Thus, the types of Chinese-English code-switching in auto advertising, in addition tothe above analysis forms, sometimes are a mixture of two or more than two kinds offorms. No matter what forms code-switching, the automobile advertising often treatsChinese as the main language, the English language as the embedded language.The paper makes a tentative study of Chinese-English code-switching as acommunicative strategy in automobile advertisement from the perspective ofadaptation theory. This research will significantly broaden the coverage ofcode-switching studies and enrich the domain of auto ads studies. It will deepen ourunderstanding of this language phenomenon as well as the adaptation theory. With thepragmatic analysis of auto ads, we will have a new view on understanding andevaluating auto ads and get some implications on how to make better use ofcode-switching strategy to achieve our goals in various communicative activities. Ihope this paper has certain help to the study of code-switching and application in thefield of advertising, and provides some theoretical and practical basis and reference tothe comprehensive understanding of advertising language, makes marketers designmore creative ads.There exists some shortcomings. First of all, in the application of theory, thispaper systematically introduces the application of code switching and adaptationtheory, but little literature on Chinese-Eng1ish code-switching in auto advertising canbe consulted, leading to the results may not comprehensive, not exhaustive. Second,in terms of data collection, auto ads update soon, so that the collected corpus can notcomprehensive enough in a period of time. The paper analyzes the most popular andcharacteristics CS corpus from collected100auto advertising. Third, in practical, dueto the limitation of condition and time, the characteristics of Chinese-Englishcode-switching in auto advertising are not further indentified whether suit for otheradvertising areas, or have any similarities and differences.For further study of English-Chinese code-switching in advertising from theperspective of adaptation theory, this paper also puts forward some suggestions. First, in the future study, the date should be much larger from different areas and keep pacewith time to representative enough to explain some other types of CS in autoadvertising. Second, more factors should be considered. We should combine with allfields advertising research, absorb the advantages, sum up the advertising method andapply to various fields, so as to realize the economic benefits. Third, this paper onlyrelies on the two theories to research code-switching. Thus, we can try other theoriesto analyze Chinese-English code-switching, such as the perspective of multimodalmetaphor, high-context and low-context, memetic, relevance. The paper can alsofuture study the Sino-Japanese, Sino-French, China-Russia code-switching inadvertising on account of Chinese-English code-switching in auto adverting. Four,Code-switching, as a linguistic phenomenon, has been accepted by more and morepeople, but at the same time, we should pay attention to the inseparability betweenlanguage and culture. Language carries the key information of culture, promotingculture dissemination. Advertisers in the design process not only focus on thelanguage level, but also should take into account the code difference between cultures.The excessive pursuit of foreignization will have the opposite effect, thus it isnecessary to have a correct attitude towards the phenomenon of code-switching inadvertising.