A Study Of Chinese-English Code-switching In The Advertisements On Taobao From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

The study of code-switching is an important field in the study of language use.With the development of society, the communication between different nations becomes more and more frequent. So scholars have paid attention to the study of code-switching phenomenon in language communication. Scholars have done a lot of analysis and researches of code-switching on the reasons, forms, effects and so on.Relevance Theory is a cognitive theory which is the basis of cognitive pragmatics. As a new and effective pragmatic theory, Relevance Theory provides us a new approach to the analysis of code-switching. Taobao has become one of the most popular websites which covering a vast majority of online shopping population in China after several years of development since its inception. As a commercial website, the success of Taobao accurately reflects its excellent promotion strategy. In recent years,with the continuous improvement of the degree of internationalization and the massive increasing in the number of Chinese-English bilinguals, the advertisements which include Chinese-English code-switching become the dynamic embodiment of language use. Therefore, it is very valuable to analyze these abundant corpus. It not only reflects some characteristics of code-switching and reasons of using code-switching, but also guides advertising designers to improve their design concept in using code-switching. Hence, merchants can achieve the purpose of attracting more consumers and promoting sales.The thesis mainly discusses the Chinese-English code-switching on Taobao from the perspective of Relevance Theory. With the collection and analysis of the Chinese-English code-switching on Taobao, the thesis analyzes and summarizes some characteristics of code-switching. And then, the reasons and effects of code-switching are discussed from the perspective of Relevance Theory. This study randomly selects108 advertisements on Taobao web pages as the research object. By adopting quantitative method, this study runs statistics on the number and percentage of four insert modes of language codes. And then, by adopting qualitative method, this study analyzes and discusses the characteristics, the reasons and the effects of Chinese-English code-switching.First, there are three major aspects of characteristics of code-switching in advertisements on Taobao:(1) the scope of publicizing coverage: many advertisements are created to arouse the consumers’ attention for the entire promoting activities,especially on some special occasions and in some holidays.(2) the distribution of audience: most of the advertisements are designed to promote products specially for female consumers.(3) the insert mode of language codes: direct insertion, new information insertion, duplication and vocative expression. And then, there are two main aspects of reasons for using Chinese-English code-switching: audience naturally psychological factors and social environment which has become increasingly internationalized. Next, the thesis discusses that advertisement is a kind of ostensive-inferential process. It argues that the purpose of using code-switching is to achieve context optimal relevance. At last, there are four aspects of effects of Chinese-English code-switching: gaining a foreign flavor, emphasizing the important information, decorating the advertisements and making the application of words convenient.