Abstract

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Title:: A Probe into the Ads with Mixed Codes from the Perspective of Markedness Model

Keywords:: advertising discourses; Markedness Model; code-mixing; syntactic categories; socio-pragmatic functions

Abstract:: As a special communicative activity between advertising agencies and their target consumers, advertising is becoming indispensable to our contemporary life. Advertising discourses, particularly those Chinese, the matrix language, being embedded with English, are increasingly popular. By making an investigation into the data of advertisements with mixed codes from popular newspapers and based on the theory of Markedness Model, the probe found that the English codes syntactically fall into phrases, clauses and letters; and that “e”, “spa”, and “PK” are the most frequently used codes. Besides informing its target consumers of their goods or services, these codes play the socio-pragmatic functions by making the ads vogue, elegant, innovative, and eye-catching.