The discursive construction of identity in chinese english bilingual advertising a critical inquiry 2

The chapter starts out with a critical review of the literature pertinent to the subject of English as a contact language worldwide Section 2.1 and to the construction of identity repres

CHAPTER 2

LITERATURE REVIEW AND BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE

Two main areas to be covered in this chapter are the literature review of identity study in bilingual advertising, as well as some theoretical and socio-cultural background related to this research topic The chapter starts out with a critical review of the literature pertinent

to the subject of English as a contact language worldwide (Section 2.1) and to the construction of identity (re)presented in the textual form of bilingual advertising (Section 2.2) The former lays emphasis on two major points about the diverse functions of English and its local, situated appropriation And the latter, by discussing in detail the drawbacks and inadequacy of the theoretical and methodological frameworks the available studies adopted in examining the construction of identity in bilingual advertising, suggests the significance of the social constructionist and poststructuralist views of identity and the need for a more nuanced interpretative methodology By this, the chapter aims to offer some practical reasons upon which the argument of the next chapter will be grounded to develop an integrative approach to bilingualism and identity located in the particular domain of advertising Section 2.3 proceeds to discuss the nowadays complex, conflicting identity with the help of Bhabha’s (1994) notion “third space” It emphasizes the likelihood for identities (re)presented in bilingual advertisements being the consequence

of mutual influence of two different languages and their embedded different cultures Section 2.4 is devoted to defining specifically the terms “code-mixing”, “ideology”, and

“power” for the present study The chapter finally provides in Section 2.5 with an overall description of advertising practice and English situation in contemporary China

2.1 English as a Contact Language

From the very beginning, it seems quite necessary to have an overview of English as a contact language in terms of dimensions of its function and meaning when resettled and exploited in non-English-language advertising This section is also set to discuss the diverse usage of English in entirely different social, cultural, and political systems of non-Anglophonic countries

2.1.1 Indexical value of English

There is an amazingly sizeable body of literature on language contact phenomenon in advertising in multilingual settings In these studies attention to English has already been shifted from its label as loan words toward its symbolic function, while its referential meaning may or may not be intended

Commonly thought of as one of the first moving beyond the focus on loan forms

to discuss the functions of language mixing in advertising communication, Haarmann (1984), in his groundbreaking work on the use of a number of European languages in the site of Japanese advertising, observed that a foreign language functions mainly for its symbolic meaning by associating it with the wider community's perception of its ethno-cultural stereotypes Compared with the other languages such as French, German and Spanish, English is often highlighted as the first choice of language regularly activating or triggering a wide range of ethno-cultural stereotypes Associations of advertised products with an ethno-cultural stereotype of English usually include “British’ class”, “the myth of the American West”, and “the youth culture, hip hop rebellion, and street credo of the Black urban U.S ghetto” (Piller 2003: 175)

The use of English as pointing to an ethno-cultural stereotype, however, in no way has been frequently and deeply exploited The fact of the matter is that a large part of studies in this field are more concerned with its usage in terms of socio-indexical relationship A number of scholars customarily describe this bilingual practice as a symbol

that is linked more often to a social stereotype than to an ethno-cultural one (e.g., Bhatia & Ritchie 2004; Piller 2003; Kolly-Holmes 2005; Takashi 1990a, 1992) More specifically,

in addition to its association with general American or British cultures for which it usually stands, English is by and large described fantastically in relation to an array of social concepts, including modernity, progress, global imagery, future, innovation, technological efficiency, internationalization, standardization, fashion, competence, rationality, sophistication, and so on Pragmatic meanings encoded within and through the use of English in non-English-language advertising have been the main research focus that most

of these studies attempt to investigate Inferably, only if English is used to convey stereotypical associations, it is not necessary, as has been suggested by some empirical studies (e.g., Chesire & Moser 1994; Haarmann 1989), for target audiences to have some knowledge of the English language

It needs to be underlined, which is probably even more important and relevant for the present study, that functions of a specific English word or expression are by no means always identically or uniformly symbolic across entirely different social, cultural and political systems This has long been the convincing conclusion in the work of Chesire and Moser (1994) that asserts the way of using English in locally situated advertising is unique

in every country In their study of English mixing in print advertisements of speaking Switzerland, the scholars reveal two findings of interest In the first hand, English is not at all used for its symbolic function only Given a majority of the population

French-in the context of Switzerland has at least some knowledge of English, the simplicity of English words and syntactic structure in most cases of their sample does not exclude the possibility for English to serve referential function instead In the second hand, the figurative use of English drawing on the special case of pun is not rare.The finding thatfigurative English usage is one of most frequently employed ways of promotional writing should not be odd particularly for advertising communication Hence, it is nạve to say that

English always functions its symbolic value when used in non-English-language advertising In the context of Korea, Lee (2006: 61) similarly observes that the use of English in Korean advertising is not merely to serve the attention-getting role or simply to create positive “feeling” regarding modernity and internationalization What at least follows is that some English words or expressions do work referentially for semantic meaning as well in the site of non-English-language advertising

For the time being, it is equally important to make reference to semantic incongruence of certain English words with their putative equivalents in other languages

To account for the pervasive presence of English in some domains including advertising in Japan, Morrow (1987) draws our attention to the semantic discrepancy existing between the English and Japanese languages For Morrow, the main reason underlying the use of English in Japan is “not because Japanese lacks words or expressions to refer to things, but rather because the loanwords allow speakers to express certain nuances, which would not

be expressed by the Japanese word” (1987: 51) Based on an empirical study of English mixing in Chinese newspapers and magazines of Hong Kong, Li lends support to Morrow, arguing that some cases of English usage are attributed to the fact of there being “the lack

of a lexicalized equivalent in Chinese” (1996: 61) In order to avoid the loss of fine nuances English can evoke, the use of English in these Chinese newspapers and magazines

is relatively more convenient and efficient for meaning expression

In addition to the incongruity in semantics, the culture-specificity of the English language, rather than its abstract and general ethno-cultural stereotypes, is likewise significant for meaning construction in the site of bilingual advertising The compelling reason is that some English words and expressions are originated, defined, applied, and comprehended against culture-specific characteristics of Anglophone concepts This especially holds true for cases of using complex abstract English vocabulary, such as terms for emotions, attitudes, values, and social ideals that tends to be highly culture-specific

(Goddard 2006; Wierzbicka 1992, 1997) For instance, in talking about emotions, Wierzbicka (1992) notes English words are English representations of emotions, and as such they embody a particular perspective, a particular linguistic and cultural slant This realization suggests us not to discard the possibility for this type of meaning in terms of culture-specificity about the English language and its speakers in the Inner Circle (Kachru 1986) to be drawn upon for the fulfillment of certain particular functions Taking as an

example the English phrase “You’re welcome” appeared in the Rover advertisement,

Kelly-Holmes (2005) presents cogently the possibility for English sometimes “fetished” to such an extent that the allusion to the British/English reputation for good manners is tactically exploited subtly Yet, with this extremely rare exception noted, the culture-specific value of English surprisingly seems to have been almost completely overlooked or ignored in the literature of bilingualism research in advertising and has yet to be examined and interpreted

The complexity of meaning potential the English language and its usage may have for meaning construction actually becomes a major factor that plausibly demands us not to distinguish so unambiguously the disparate categories of meaning that some English

words or expressions may simultaneously convey when deployed as a pair-language in

non-English-language advertising Provided the likelihood of various types of meaning potential English may allude to, convey or generate, this study primarily follows the suggestion by Li (1996) to take the “indexical value” of English as the reason resulting in the mixing of English The term indexical value is differentiated with Charles Pierce’s

“index value” By indexical value, what I intend to stress is that all meanings including semantic nuance and culture-specificity that emanate from the form of an actual word, or

“everything concerned with the conceptualization of the message” (Grace 1981: 24, cited

in Li 1996: 27), must be carefully taken into consideration when grappling with intangible motivations underlying the use of English In this study, the notion of indexical value is

adopted to capture the complexity of meaning potential English may convey

These lines of discussion all in the same way point to the equal importance of referential content, semantic nuance, and culture-specificity that an English word or expression may potentially convey, in addition to its symbolic meaning universally defined as modern in the broadest sense The conclusion to emerge from this suggests one crucial requirement for not dealing with the relationship between English and its meaning potential in a strictly homogeneous way The complex and unstable feature of meaning relationship actually becomes a major, and probably decisive, factor that invites us not to distinguish so unmistakably the dimensions of indexical value of English in meaning construction

Cognitive linguist Vyvyan Evans probably has a similar picture in mind of indexical value under discussion, when he says “the semantic value associated with a lexical concept has (at least) five dimensions (semantic potential, encapsulation, relational

vs non-relational, temporal structure, and referentiality)” (2006: 509)1 The cognitive

perspective of meaning, in my opinion, might be exceptionally helpful to solve the problem we analysts may encounter in exploring a variety of dimensions of indexical value of English and their role in constructing identities in the textual form of bilingual advertising

After having discussed at length the possible categories of meaning potential for the English language when resettled and exploited as a pair-language in non-English-language advertising, I shall now take a further step to discuss the dynamics of this bilingual practice -that is, its local, contextualized social meaning and function

2.1.2 Diversity of English usage across the world

1

For Evans, “Evidence for this encapsulating function comes from culture-specific lexical concepts which cannot be easily captured in another language” (2006: 510)

The occurrence of English across the world is routinely regarded as the consequence of English spread accompanied by the process of globalization But “the political economy of code choice” (Gal 1988) tells us that the production, circulation, and distribution of English cannot be even in this stratified world (cf Blommaert 2005; Park & Wee 2009) What seems even more important is that globalization is heatedly discussed, as well as practically demonstrated, in terms of both of its homogeneity and uniformity, and of its heterogeneity and variability Following this, there are significant differences in the way English is actually used globally, as Strevens (1992) points out Finally, the spread of English exemplifying cultural relocation in the multilingual and multicultural context of the world is often bi- or multi-directional, whereby cultures and subcultures continuously influence each other and probably engender a new one (e.g., Blommaert 2005; Pakir 2000; Pennycook 2007) In a particular socio-cultural context, it is even possible for English to

be highly appropriated for negotiation, contest, subversion, transgression, and other forms

of linguistic acts of resistance to the remaking of local culture, as works such as Lee (2004) and Pred (1990) have proved When coming to discuss the ongoing spread of English as a global language, cognizance also needs to be given to the complex, multifaceted, flexible and ever-changing dynamism of global-local linkages, and the intricate web of interconnection between globalism and localism

It is against this background of globalization that the use of English in question is interpreted as part of both global and local social systems and the outcome of interaction between them Being situated in different social, cultural, and political contexts, the bilingual phenomenon in advertising of different places cannot be entirely stable or uniform Rather, with its concomitant innovations this bilingual practice allows a space for reinvention, revision, and hybridization The highlighting of the creative and innovative aspects of English application is not rare in some empirical studies of bilingual advertising

(e.g., Gerritsen et al 2007) Bhatia (2000, 2001, 2002), who addresses the specific issue of

globalization in advertising communication, refers to heterogeneous strategies of English usage across the globe as “glocalization”, a notion discussed extensively by Robertson (1992) As a more productive and optimal fashion, glocalization lays far greater emphasis

on cooperation and integration of global diversity over competition and homogenization The diversity of English usage across the world is ultimately motivated by the interrelations between strategies of language practice and ideologies about this language held in different places In the discussion of the spread of English across the globe, Park and Wee (2008) make it explicit that language ideologies have strong influence on the symbolic values assigned to language appropriation Language ideologies, defined by Michael Silverstein in linguistic anthropology, are “sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalization of justification of perceived language structure and use” (1979: 193, cited in Kroskrity 2000: 5) The fact that attitudes and beliefs about the English language differ from one nation-level community and/or communicative context

to another explains appropriately the caution taken by Blommaert: “‘good’ and carrying English in the periphery may be ‘bad’ and stigma-carrying English in the core of the world system” (2003: 616) In studying the use of English in Dutch TV commercials, Gerritsen and his associates (2000) discover that attitudes toward this language practice, even among young people who are presumed to appreciate English more considerably than the older, are far less positive than usually expected All the subjects they interviewed

status-display a rather negative attitude toward English In the way argued by Gerritsen et al

(2000: 29), there are two main fundamental reasons -one, the position of English as the main language of communication is neither “super” nor “substandard” in Dutch language community; the other, Dutch people in the process of European unification attaching more value to their native language, a marker of their identity What is of evidence is that English does not automatically generate positive functions as rosily as advertisers there may anticipate for a connection between products and a modern image Even when dealing

with social meaning of English in terms of symbolic value, we have to be fully conscious

of its complexities, instabilities and unpredictability of meaning relations and presumable functions

An inference is readily followed -the broader context needs to be entirely appreciated in any attempt to account for the realization of presumable effects produced primarily through or in relation to the use of English.By this, the bilingual phenomenon in advertising can no longer be simply connected to the global spread of English, but especially relevant to the higher-level social, cultural and political ends of countries where such bilingual advertisements are produced and consumed Alternatively put, the use of English cannot be purely viewed from the ethnocentric perspective, but to be entangled with entirely new social, cultural and political issues

Above we have come to share the point that the use of English in language advertising is a globally present, but locally resonant, cultural practice that is mobilized to negotiate the global-local nexus Anderson underscores that imagined

non-English-communities are distinguished “not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the way in which they are imagined” (1983: 15, italics added) The intricate relationship does exist among

“style” of English mixing, “ideologies”, and “imagined communities” Style here is not considered an overarching concept that covers a wide range of linguistic varieties, such as genre, register, and sometimes, social dialects Rather, it takes Irvine’s (2001) conception

of “style” to investigate how the occurrence of English in non-English-language advertising of different places constitutes different “styles” of meaning construction, as well as how these styles construct and represent distinctive social identities (cf Auer 2005) A group style is significantly meaningful to the social participants when it is considered in “a system of distinction, in which a style contrasts with other possible styles” (Irvine 2001: 22) In such theorization, it once again becomes significant to understand how specific style of English usage fits in ongoing process of local political

discourse, under precisely what conditions this style is produced, constructing what specific identities in the site of bilingual advertising

To sum up the discussion of this section, the indexical value of English, first, suggests the desire to look at meaning potential of English and its usage from a cognitive perspective; second, this cross-cultural language contact phenomenon is highly locally contextualized and characterized Relying upon the arguments over language meaning and social association, it is appropriate for this bilingual phenomenon to be considered in terms

of social “meaning potential” (Halliday 1973: 53) that is called up or activated or validated,

or undermined or challenged or parodied, in particular discursive frames for particular local effects This point of view will become even far clearer when the notion of identity largely being the result of advertiser agency and that of bilingualism as a social practice are discussed and elaborated in the following section and in Chapter 3, respectively These two aspects, it must be kept in mind, are not separable but closely interconnected in producing social meanings and functions of English in the domain of advertising

2.2 Previous Studies of Identity Construction in Bilingual Advertising

This section reviews critically the available studies of identity in the literature of bilingualism research in advertising Three major aspects -the theoretical perspective, the analytical approach, and meaning construction in the particular genre of advertising -are the topics for thorough discussion It is argued that the vital weakness of these studies lies

in their taking the symbolic value of English as universally modern and always necessarily playing a decisive role in the complete process of meaning construction in contextually situated advertising texts What they have failed to examine is the dynamic and creative dimension of indexicality and the likelihood for identity to be strategically formed as the consequence of a set of meaning-making elements co-working within a given advertisement Therefore, their analysis principally guided by this position and the

approach they follow are likely to be simplistic or even probably misinterpretive

2.2.1 A brief introduction to three studies

To my best knowledge, there are only four studies -namely, Gao (2005), Lee (2006), Martin (2006), and Piller (2001) -that have looked exclusively into the construction of identity in bilingual advertising, although some others probably involve more or less this research topic as well Before making a critical review of them in detail, I would like to

make a brief introduction to each of them at the onset

Martin (2006) describes a picture of how images of the United States and its

citizens are semiotically represented and expressed in French advertising not only through English but also through visual “slices of Americans” This work may best be treated as the one scrutinizing cross-cultural representation of national identity of the United States and collective identities of its citizens, rather than those of France and Frenchmen, target audiences of French advertising In doing so, Martin chiefly based on Halliday’s social functional model and Kachru’s world Englishes perspective as approaches

The three other studies that concentrate on the topic of identity construction, respectively, in Germany (Piller 2001), China (Gao 2005), and Korea (Lee 2006) are more relevant to the present study and will be the focus of the review below Piller proposes to view the bilingual practice as a compilation of hybrid social identities that are shifting from the once dominant political ones toward economic ones In Piller’s account, it is this identity change that influences a shift “from monolingual practices to multilingual and English-dominant ones” (2001: 153) Based upon a corpus of German commercials collected from various television networks and two national newspapers, Piller observed that bilingualism is part of a prestige identity that German advertising projects Intimately connected with the use of English, multiple modern identities constructed in the form of orientation -“international orientation”, “future orientation”, “success orientation”,

“sophistication”, and “fun orientation” -for Piller are designed only for young bilinguals

in Germany Piller finally points out that in most cases the bilinguals her data target are gendered as male

The study of Gao (2005) as himself claimed is principally made from the angle of advertisers by concentrating on the creative practice of English usage for persuasion and identity construction Following the sociolinguistic position of language as a major tool in the process of identity construction, Gao identified six illustrative but not exclusive social identities constructed in his data collected both from the electrical and the print media of China Five out of them were found almost identical to those in Piller The sixth one was termed “modern identity” (Gao 2005: 832), which, due to the fluid notion of being modern, might well be taken as a superordinate identity encompassing the five others (cf Lee 2006) The audiences Chinese-English bilingual advertisements intend to reach were assumed to include at least three groups in China -young well-off professional, college graduates, and students of high school and college

In the study discussing the linguistic construction of modernity in Korean TV commercials in which English is chosen, Lee (2006) set up his goal to extend that of Piller

in three aspects First and foremost, while Piller concentrated exclusively on those of English (sometimes also French, Spanish, or Italy) -German mixing, a comparative treatment of Korean-only commercials versus English-Korean mixed ones is adopted Thereby the study of Lee, in Lee’s own words, provides a much more accurate and convincing account, with which I am in agreement, that the language practice of English mixing achieves a certain goal of modern image that is not sought in Korean-only commercials Lee furthermore makes a point of the existence of an age-related language subgroup associated within the same business elite class, which, too, is not suggested in Piller The final difference, another point of strength in the work of Lee, is its establishment of a characteristic linkage between the construction of modern identity and

globalization Lee argues in greater detail about the likelihood, and, more important, its analytical advantage, to combine the two separate aspects of identity construction and globalization for interlinking the choice of English with modernity For Lee, the term

“modern identity” could be a superordinate identity that encompasses all forms of orientation Piller suggested Despite these strengths, as the following discussion shows, a simple dichotomy between “traditional” and “modern” appeals is nevertheless apparent Gender is another aspect of social identity Lee has attempted to explore In response to modernity, traditional gender roles of female and male have drastically redefined and reinterpreted in Korean-English bilingual commercials -females now become powerful, independent, aggressive, and unreserved, while males are characterized as “metrosexual” (Lee 2006: 82)

2.2.2 Social-indexical perspective of identity

In delving deeply into the construction of identity in bilingual advertising where English is used as an additional language, Piller (2001), Gao (2005), and Lee (2006) all either explicitly or implicitly take as point of departure the perspective of social-indexical qualities of English The social-indexical perspective that was traditionally developed in sociolinguistic variation for studying the relation of variation to social categorizations and configurations is traceable to as early as in Labov (1972) By the perspective of variation, features bear their social meanings much more frequently with non-referential indexes than referential indexes In the three empirical studies is easily identified of English not only being used to symbolize modern uniformly, but also to index target audiences being

at least bilinguals whose language repertoire includes English2 These two points are worth

discussing at length one by one for a critical review below After that, it finally points out

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Gao (2005) has some reservation on this point considering the various levels of English proficiency among Chinese young people

that as social theories of variation develop greater depth, a study of identity in bilingualism research requires a much more sophisticated, integrative treatment of social qualities of English that places it within the wider range of linguistic practices with which advertisers make social meanings

The adaptation of the social-indexical perspective is principally built around a

“cultural model” (Quinn 1991; Gee 1999) shared in Germany, China, and Korea that English is the symbol of modernity Piller makes it explicit by stating that “German is relegated to the language of mundane factual information”, while English mainly does the symbolic work of providing stereotypical associations with the cultures where English is spoken (2001: 180) The drawbacks of taking the static social-indexical perspective as the starting point to examine identity are undeniably evident A defensible criticism, particularly from linguistic anthropology, is that the social-indexical perspective assumes a direct correlation between a linguistic feature and a social characteristic3 To enhance our

understanding of this point, it is useful to have a look at the work of Silverstein (1998,

2003, 2005) on indexicality For Silverstein, indexes can work either referentially or referentially, or both Indexes work referentially, when establishing their meaning contributing to propositional information; non-referential indexical signs, on the other hand, do not contribute to propositional meaning And, more significantly, many indexical forms have both referential and symbolic meanings that are simultaneous, yet independent

non-of one another

Following the position taken by Silverstein, a simple question immediately -is it as fully true as Piller has claimed that English only does the symbolic work in her

arises 3

In addition, the traditional sociolinguistic variation approach is not sufficient to capture adequately cultural dimension of English Kachru (1986: 160) seems fully aware that cultural dimension of a language has to be sought out at the cognitive level, when he speaks of “the underlying thought-patterns of bilinguals” being responsible for nativization While this issue concerning the relation of English nativization to sociocultural systems is beyond the scope of this study, it is little doubt that the static social-indexical perspective has its limits for studying identity in the domain of bilingual advertising

data? As far as I know, a few examples that Piller herself (and Gao and Lee) decided on for illustration in fact work for referential, but not symbolic, purpose, or at least work for both so as to single out the symbolic meaning for clarification since the symbolic meaning

of English, as Piller herself acknowledges, is “fragmented and polyvocal” (2000: 277) By

the way of example, let us consider for a moment the A T Kearney advertisement in Piller

(2001) with its textual body almost exclusively designed in English Drawing on the lexical choice of “future” coupled with some visual elements, Piller concluded that the target audiences of this advertisement are verbally addressed as future-oriented The

English noun future, on which the conclusion heavily relies, certainly expresses concrete

information obviously related to its literal meaning The point is that the production of such an identity in this case, to the greatest extent, is the consequence of the referential function of English Gao lent support to this argument, saying that not only does the symbolic value of English but also “the type of messages that English is connected with” function significantly in constructing identities in Chinese-English bilingual advertising (2005: 835).This argument could become even more sensible, if recognizing the intended audiences at whom these commercials aim are as hypothesized by as bilinguals in the countries of Germany, China and Korea whose habitual repertoire includes the English language In other words, the hypothesis of the intended audiences as young, cosmopolitan bilinguals (ironically) lends support to the claim that English is most likely to be mixed for producing referential and figurative meaning

Apart from the distinction between referential and non-referential indexical, it is equally important to appreciate that indexicality is now well defined as a layered, creative, interactive process that lies at the heart of the discursive workings of language Silverstein (2005: 9) asserts that index may be relatively more presupposing or creative/entailing by emphasizing the “indexical-metric performance” of cultural concepts and identities in linguistic interaction This suggests that axes of indexicality along which indexes establish

meaning are inherently multiple and variable in the very act of language practice Because

of the infinite possibilities inherent in the association of signs with meanings, indexes are never given, but continuously negotiated and recreated in interactions

Interestingly enough, a growing number of scholars in the field of code-switching research (e.g., Heller 1988; Meeuwis & Blommaert 1994) have long challenged such a deterministic model of identity Conversation analysts (e.g., Auer 1992, 1998; Li 2005) in particular question whether a static notion of indexicality, drawing upon the analysts’ perceptions rather than on local or situated meanings, has potential to capture the diversity

of interactions in multilingual settings Sebba and Wootton, for example, explicate that

“the relationship between code and identity is necessarily more complex than one-to-one” (1998: 284) Bailey (2000a, 2000b) agrees, arguing that among the Spanish/English bilingual Dominican Americans he studied, language is a key to the construction of identity, both as the medium through which it is constructed and as a symbol, but not necessarily in a straightforward way (See also Fuller 2007) On the grounds of their idea, it

is wrong to simply assume that the same social values, role identities, or persona are always indexed each time bilinguals employ a particular code; rather, the indexical meanings of linguistic forms, in Auer’s (1992) word, are both “brought along” to the interaction as well as “brought about” in the interaction itself

The lines of discussion, all in all, drive us away from traditional sociolinguistic approaches to identity that view the way we “talk” as directly indexing a pre-discursive self in bilingual contexts It now becomes quite clear of the inadequacy of the static social-indexical perspective for examining the construction of modern identity in relation to the use of English in the site of advertising

Not least thanks to the indexical-metric performance of English mixing and identity being the product of interaction, it is possible for the forms of modern identity constructed and (re)presented in bilingual advertisements to be hybrid, fluid, and as Auer

(1995; see also Hill 1985) points out, hard to be predicted Adopting the Conversation Analysis approach to bilingual conversation, Li (2005) among many others thus proposes

to analyze code-switching phenomena through the detailed, sequential examination of interaction He says, “To focus on the interaction-external factors alone means ignoring the richness of the interactive work speakers do in conversation and risks imposing of the analysts’ interpretation without evidence” (Li 2005: 387) To any study of identity construction in the site of bilingual advertising, it is equally advisable to make close observation of English usage so as to enlighten the relative creativity of referential and/or non-referential indexes and achieve greater reliability of the analytical results

The possibility of fluid, unpredictable identity is evenly pertinent to and significant for providing an account of the inappropriate assumption that the aspects of modern identity thus (re)presented target or available to young, cosmopolitan bilinguals only As we saw already in the beginning of this section, Piller and Lee both have no hesitation in connecting English as an index of group identity to young bilinguals in their countries Choice of language, it seems, makes direct associations between products and intended audiences of young bilinguals with roughly equal linguistic competence of both languages Viewed in this way, the use of English is by far more responsive or accommodative than initiative to a particular group of young bilinguals If being treated as

a sociolinguistic variable or style shift as variationists usually dealing with bilingual practices in mass media communication, the position the three scholars took for exploring the nature of group identity and the role that the English language plays in symbolizing an identity of one social group is indeed a kind of “Audience Design” model (Bell 1984)

To simplify the theory of Audience Design somewhat, “intra-speaker variation is a response to inter-speaker variation, chiefly as manifested in one’s interlocutors” (Bell 1984: 158) The model that might be extremely relevant to the present study merits some elaboration Allow me, first of all, to make it more specific by looking at Bell’s approach

to mass media communication including of advertising In Bell’s account, stylistic variation in the mass media is a need to satisfy the audience, to persuade them and to identify with them:

The responsive dimension of communicators’ language reflects the power of the audience to switch off and reject a station Communicators need to persuade their audiences, because media live by the size and composition of their audience … Communicators persuade by using language as an expression of shared identity with the audience (Bell 1984: 193)

In the case of bilingual advertising, advertisers were understood to avoid salient features of their language usage and adopt those of intended audiences in order to gain acceptance or cooperation -and to present a common or at least less divergent identity What follows by implication is that English is used as if it were a product to be sold to intended audiences, adopting those features that are more acceptable for them Alternatively put, the Audience Design model would predict precisely this language practice as directly influenced by features of a particular group of audiences

This does not necessarily follow, however, that this social group must be speakers

of English, provided that the widely shared viewpoint that promotional purpose of commercial advertising is to reach and appeal to potentially a largest number of consumers Interestingly, in his work Gao started off with the line as follows -“the paper does not claim that the targeted audiences necessarily have knowledge of English” (2005: 834), despite his presumption of the target audiences being composed of three groups as noted above Piller contradicts herself by saying that “even if the audience does not understand the denotational message of the English part”, “they will activate their stereotypes about English and English-speaking persons and cultures and transfer them to the product (Cheshire & Moser 1994; Haarmann 1986, 1989; Piller 1999; Wienold 1995)” (2001: 163)

As a matter of fact, the domain of non-responsive, initiative style shifts entitled

“Referee Design” has long been developed by Bell (1999, 2001) himself from the responsive dimension of Audience Design In his study of the use of a Maori song

Pokarekare Ana language in two Air New Zealand TV commercials, Bell (1999) stresses

the very fact that even though very few New Zealanders actually speak Maori, the use of Maori in the spot of commercials stimulates an identification process in the target audiences, resulting in efficient advertising The site of bilingual advertising, as demonstrated practically in van Gijsel, Speelman and Geeraerts (2008), is “linguistic ‘rich points’ for investigating referee design” (Bell 1999: 527) Following this way of discussion, bilingual advertisements do not automatically target exclusively young, cosmopolitan bilinguals In theory, everyone has access to bilingual advertising, to the pleasure of looking and to desiring, although probably only bilinguals can read and fully understand them4 In this context, one more point of equal relevance has to be added; that

is, attention in Referee Design is now shifted to non-demographic, rather than to demographic, characteristics of audience members as factors essentially affecting advertiser decision in the shaping of language choice

Following the discussion made from either the perspective of indexicality or Referee Design, it can now infer with confidence that by relying on English as an important component in the building of identity, advertisers may design or perform identity in creative and innovative ways Truly, in works such as Gal (1988), Heller (1992) and Myers-Scotton (1993, 1998), it has long been illustrated that the practice of code-switching is helpful in defining situations, identities, roles, and relationships The agency

of advertisers then in the same sense must be fully taken into consideration in analyzing the construction of identity related to language choice in advertising Agency, according to Butler (1990), is defined in terms of an advertiser’s capacity to act on dominant discourses rather than being merely acted on Since English as a linguistic and cultural resource can

be used and reused in different times and places, and social meanings it entails or produces

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For Romaine (1989), the idea of an “individual” linguistic competence of bilingual may hold little meaning outside the context of testing procedures

usually vary, the bilingual practice under discussion is a meaning making process where advertisers are engaged as meaning-making agents (cf Eckert 2000) The dynamic nature

of this practice lies in advertisers’ capacity to rely on English for creating discourses of resistance, constructing new social identities, and building their own community This recognition lends itself well to suggest further the focus of identity study to be shifted from identity simply as a highly symbolic process subject to cultural and interactional constraints, to as being “in constant flow and change according to new perceptions, new norms and new allegiances” (de Fina, Schiffrin & Bamberg 2006: 15-16)

Despite the importance of advertiser agency in the discursive process of identity construction, I in no way want to suggest that the use of English is completely the result of advertiser’s individualistic, unconstrained work; otherwise, the bilingual phenomenon becomes romanticized Instead of being universally and directly connected, indexical meanings of English as noted earlier are more often than not structured and interpreted in the highly contextual ways and closely tied in with language attitudes and language use of the local (Hanks 2000: 125) Moreover, advertisers are relatively constrained in their choice of options by the social and institutional structuring of discursive resources which are available to them for appropriation (Chouliaraki & Fairclough 1999: 48) While English may be exploited independent of the specific motivations and attitudes of advertisers, their initiatives are in turn conditioned by social and institutional structures Interestingly, it is in relation to such social and institutional structures that identities take

on their social meanings In conclusion, even if modern identities (re)presented in the textual form of bilingual advertising are available only to young bilinguals, a sense of modern identity among this social group cannot be taken for granted or presumed; it is the intentional or non-intentional consequence of interactions involving the use of English which on their turn are socially patterned and structured

As far as my discussions are concerned, the works of Piller, Gao and Lee, due to

taking the static social-indexical perspective, on the one hand, fails to study identity through close examination of text-situated local interactions involving English, and on the other, falls into the error of disembedding the very act of English mixing from its social and cultural substratum when establishing a sharp distinction between the designing of identity and the use of English

The above argument against the presumption of modern identities (re)presented in bilingual advertisements only targeting bilinguals naturally gives rise to a subject matter as regards how non-bilinguals can identify themselves with these aspects of modern identity This topic I think is evenly important to the present purpose and worth a brief discussion at this stage

Various theorists have suggested clearly that identity in late modernity is increasingly reflexive and that contemporary individuals now have “no choice but to choice” (Giddens 1991: 81) -to construct actively a coherent and viable sense of self-identity from the various means at their disposal The late modern world is defined by consumption (Bauman 1992) Consumers in late modern societies may self-associate or -identify with a new lifestyle connected to the products being advertised, and buy when they can see a match with their own personality (e.g., Giddens 1991; Leary 1995)5 For

non-bilinguals, one way to claim different forms of modern identity textually (re)presented

in bilingual advertising is simply to buy and consume a product being advertised Piller (2001: 156) contradictorily makes a point of the interrelation among acts of consumption and consumer identities, while insisting the availability of modern identities constructed in the German-English bilingual advertisements only to bilinguals there This study follows

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Giddens (1991) meanwhile posits a caveat that people will react creatively to commodification, i.e., people are not necessarily compelled to accept any particular product in one specific way Possibly, target audiences may resist and reject an identity that is being portrayed, as the rise of modernity has also generated new capacities for self-expression and empowerment

Giddens’s perception that reflexivity is the most important characteristic of the modern self One huge value of self-identification lies in its usually making consumers imbued with a kind of consciousness that they can choose their own social identity through consumption, the recognition that is connectable to the most subtle form of advertisers’ ideology (e.g., Williamson 1978; Kress 1987) And a study of identity in bilingual advertising is suggestive to be meaningful only if examined by being connected to broader social ideologies reflected in and through the use of English

The sense of self-identification, to be sure, needs to be treated with a degree of caution, since building one’s own identity by buying and consuming an advertised product

is not without a risk Hill claims, for instance, “[t]his constructed self will be rejected as

‘inauthentic’ and that “the crosser will be rejected as”, in Cutler’s words, a “‘wannabe’ by peers of both ‘own’ and ‘other’ group” (1999: 552) Giddens (1991) even sees this as a corruption of, and a threat to, the true quest for self Giddens at the same time makes the point that the self has a trajectory, as it develops through a “series of ‘passage’ toward authenticity” (1991: 79) Questions of authenticity, however, are not always necessarily relevant to identity To this study, it is of particular importance to remember that the slippery concept of authenticity, to follow Bucholtz, is defined as “the outcome of the linguistic practices of social actors and the metalinguistic practices of sociolinguists” (2003: 399) In a word, target audiences come into being around specific media technologies and meaning-making elements at particular social and historical moments and they need to be understood in relation to these dynamics

Thus being agreed, the question of how the imaginary or inauthentic identity reaches the minds of target audiences who are convinced by it and identify themselves with it through consumption is easy to answer -it is constructed and conveyed in the discourse of advertising practice Notably, this position is in response to recent scholarship

of identity study emphatically seeing identity as emergent in discourse, locally formed,

fluid, and ever-changing (Bucholtz & Hall 2005) The issue is that there exist social practices and discourses that try to establish essential perceptions of bilingualism, identity, and consumption In line with the earlier argument for a close inquiry into the interactions

of this language practice, it now becomes meaningful, even necessary, to study the concrete processes of identity construction and formation primarily related to or shaped by the use of English, a process through which products are defined and placed in a way which may imply definitions or redefinitions of social identities

It comes as no surprise, as a final point, that all forms of modern identity related to target audiences as a social group can generally be taken as being imagined and connected

to a mental construct In discussing the notion “imagined community”, Anderson, quoted previously, characterizes social groups that are larger than “face-to-face groups” as imaged communities and supports the idea that communities are to be distinguished from one another “not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the way in which they are imagined” (1983: 15) For that matter, all social phenomena are constructed, invented or imagined: class, gender, race, nation, the lot In the same way cognitive linguists Fauconnier and Turner (2000: 299) emphatically make a point of the vital role of human beings imagination promoted by linguistic forms that plays in the achievement of an identity And advertisements, as proved by Fraser (2000), are prime examples showing strategic language use being vital to the formation of imagined communities In line with the prevalent practice “soft sell” today, this realization implies strongly the possibility for advertisers to assign identity primarily to the mental level, whereby ideas are increasingly linked more to certain emotional attitudes and value judgments than to rational by promoting idealized images for target audiences (e.g., Larson 1992; Ostman 2005)

2.2.3 Analytical framework and methodology

In both studies, the practical point of analysis principally worthwhile to note is that of

Bakhtinian concept of dialogism, point-of-view in particular, on which Piller draws as an analytical approach This seems a promising attempt at exploring identity formation and (re)presentation in advertising texts Piller writes in this way,

I aim to demonstrate that the concept of ‘point-of-view’, as pioneered by Bakhtin,

is a useful analytic tool for understanding the use of multilingualism in German advertising The meaning and concomitant interpretation of these texts is fleeting, which makes dialogism -with its acceptance of the necessary presence of gaps in analytic schemes and systems -seem like an attractive option (Piller 2001: 159)

in print commercials can be expressed unequivocally either in the form of slogan or headline The line of argument over the presence of English in slogans and headlines as a

“master” or “authoritative” voice is precisely dependent upon the fact that the function of slogan is to encapsulate the identity or philosophy of a brand, and that headlines are often perceptually salient in their large font, strong color, position and form (Piller 2001: 160) The point-of-view established and structured between the viewers and a bilingual advertisement in this sense becomes specifically that between the viewers and the slogan- and/or headline-situated English words

It is incontrovertibly accepted that the content of slogans and headlines will be processed more attentively and deeply than that of regular text segments, on account of the very facts that slogans or headlines usually provide essential information about the theme

of an advertisement, and that people spending a few seconds on reading an advertisement often concentrate on them for generating and interpreting its meaning While I am generally in agreement with Piller in this point, I confine myself to the cases where a slogan and a headline are exclusively designed in English, or where their core or main