Sino-Anglo Code-mixing In Chinese Newspaper Advertising: A Sociolinguistic Perspective

This thesis sets out to investigate Sino-Anglo code-mixing in Chinese newspaper advertising from a sociolinguistic perspective. Based on a small corpus of 603 advertisements from three newspapers in Guangdong province, the author describes the patterns of Sino-Anglo code-mixing based on Muysken's model for typology and explores the functions of this phenomenon by Markedness Theory proposed by Myers-Scotton. After this, the author tentatively explains why English is chosen as the mixed foreign code using code choice theory, and why certain type of Sino-Anglo code-mixing occurs most frequently in Chinese advertising based on Kachru's World Englishes model. All the theories concerned are used complementarily to describe and explain this linguistic phenomenon from a sociolinguistic perspective.Through this research, it is found that: (1) in terms of linguistic structure, Sino-Anglo code-mixing in Chinese advertising could be categorized into insertional one and alternational one. The former includes letter insertion, word and phrase insertion, clause insertion, and discourse insertion. And alternational code-mixing is further classified into balanced one and unbalanced one. (2) In terms of functional analysis, mixing English in Chinese advertising works as a verbal strategy for persuasiveness of advertising language. It could be furtherexposited by Markedness Theory from two aspects ------ paralinguistic andlinguistic aspect and extra-linguistic one. Paralinguistic and linguistic functions include graphological and prosodic, rhetoric, and semantic functions;extralinguistic functions consist of construction of identity and negotiation of the relationship between advertisers and consumers.