English as Local Linguistic Repertoires in Readers' Comments in Taiwanese Newspapers

I-Chung Ke

《應用英語期刊》 13期 (2018/12) Pp. 69-97

摘要

The study aims to understand to what extent and how has English become a semiotic resource in Taiwan by examining the code-mixing reader's comments in two major newspapers (Liberty Times and United Daily) from 1995 to 2015. A corpus consisted of a total of 88,952 comments, which include over 53 million tokens, was analyzed to find out how frequently and the ways the authors use English letters and words in their Chinese texts. The results show that English has been a steady linguistic resource as it accounts for approximately 1% of total tokens in the Liberty Times and 0.4% in the United Daily, in which a sharp increase in English use was spotted after 2013. The most common type of English used is normal English words, suggesting that most readers used English as an external source of reference. The frequent appearances of product and brand names in English imply that businesses increasingly adopt English directly to take advantages of English's symbolic power. Abbreviations of proper nouns are almost as common, though a few terms such as APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation), WTO (World Trade Organization), and SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) account for a significant portion. The findings suggest that the use of English as a local semiotic resource has been fragmented, dynamic, and unstable.

關鍵字

Code-mixing ； Orthography mixing ； Global English ； Language use in Taiwan