English, advertising and positioning: the impact of English on Chinese people’s daily lives

Abstract

AbstractSituated at the nexus of linguistics, media and identity, this article addresses the impact of English on Chinese people’s daily lives by exploring within the framework of positioning how the community of Chinese people in mainland China is imagined and defined through the use of English in Chinese advertising. Based on a corpus of Chinese–English bilingual advertisements, it mainly discusses the mobilisation of English as a stylistic resource in producing a variety of positioning cues that are at work in this discursive process. Five positioning cues are identified in the analysis of lexical items and discursive features of the English language that was utilized in a representative sample of advertisements: proper names of Western places, emotion words, discourses of success, and discourses of Western masculinity and femininity. They are found to have been used in three interrelated processes of locating, refashioning, and assessing Chinese people. The findings are applied as a ground for discussion of the cultural politics of English in China and the question of whether Chinese people’s sense of cultural identity is being threatened.