Linguistic Simplification in Chinese Display Advertisements

The aims of this study are to give a principled description of a widely experienced register---Chinese display advertisements (henceforth CDA)-----and to further explore the nature of register and register variation. The study postulates that while the demand for speed and efficiency of communication should result in language economy in the CDA register, an interplay of multiple linguistic and contextual factors can lead to variation from the economical convention. In selecting the linguistic features for studying the CDA register, the principle of linguistic co-occurrence as developed by Ervin-Trip (1972) is utilized. The clusters of features correlating consistently with specific conditions of use constitute a register. And the starting point for selecting function words as the linguistic features for this study is provided by Ferguson's (1982) typology of features of simple registers. Ferguson (1982:59) suggested the term "simplified register" could be expanded to include “economy register” such as sports announcer talk, telephone messages, newspaper headline, advertisements, and academic note-taking; and presented a typology of features of simple registers as a framework for description, which includes absence of function words such as copula, pronouns, and articles, etc. According to Chao (1968), Chu (1983), and Li and Thompson (1981), the following set of particles or words in Chinese are used more for syntactic functions rather than for semantic content and are thus selected for this study: pronouns, particle de, copula, aspect markers, sentence-final particles, and conjunctions. The corpus for this study involves four hundred display advertisements which were drawn from two most popular newspapers among the Chinese community in the United States: Chinese Daily News and International Daily News. To further ensure the representativeness of the corpus and to avoid the individual preference of local ad writers, the New York edition of International Daily News was selected while the Los Angeles edition for Chinese Daily News was used. Table 1 presents the total number of ads and mean text length from the newspapers.