The Application Of Register Theory To The Analysis Of Online Shopping Language

Online shopping has been becoming a common social phenomenon in the past five years with the popularity of the Internet and the convenience of the online payment. According to the survey conducted by the China Internet Network Information Center, more than194million Chinese people have online-shopping experience in2011, increasing from161million in2010. Besides, all the online shopping sites provide online chat service for buyers and sellers to exchange ideas relating the transaction process, such as Aliwangwang of Taobao. The online shopping conversation language is developing with its own features, which come as one of the hot topics of recent studies. However, none of them have touched on the systematic analysis of the language for online shopping.This thesis is targeted to do primary work on the features of online shopping language by adopting Halliday’s Register Theory. It has analyzed data collected from Taobao, the biggest online shopping website in China, mainly from three dimensions:field, tenor and mode. It is found that compared with other cyber language and the ordinary shopping language, online shopping language shows different properties in lexical, syntactic and graphological patterns under the internet environment.First, online shopping language is topic-limited and successful trade-oriented. Although buyers and sellers can hide their true information in the Internet and enjoy relatively equal status, the relationship between them is the same with the ordinary shopping activity that is the relationship of demand and supply. It is discovered that online shopping language contains the features of spoken language and written language, as well as the features of the specific field of netspeak, such as jargons of "qin","baobei", and wide use of onomatopoeia words and dialects, etc. From the syntactiv level, the participants of online shopping tend to use short and elliptical sentences, as well as interrogative and imperative sentences. The author also explores the motivations of buyers and sellers to develop and widely use the specific language for online shopping. It is hoped that this study can be helpful to the further intensive study on the emerging but important cyber language, and assist the participants of online shopping to better equip themselves to conduct successful trade.